Paranormal
A hot, muggy morning embraces the city in the early hours. It's a bad, sticky, unbearable heat. The dogs awake, and are looking for a fire hydrant to mark their territories. Up above the concrete jungle known as the city, the birds and the bees fly across in search of something which they have forgotten already.
Except for a few bees. A few particular bees. A few particular bees who decided that they'd venture forth into uncharted territory, on this particular day.
Elsewhere, we have a room. With a bed inside it, which is quite typical of rooms. The sheets are crumpled, the floor is littered with cigarette butts, which is also typical of many rooms. A young guy on the bed, strains to open an eye. His head is pounding. He feels as if Thor has come down from the Heavens and is flattening his hammer. Against this guy's head. Minutes later, another eye opens. And several minutes after that, he has managed to sit up and hold his head in his hands.
Oh, the pain. He smokes a cigarette, because there's no water to be found. It's a bad, bad morning. More so by the sunlight streaming in, which is typical of rooms that have their doors open.
Through the corner of his eye, he sees something which doesn't register at first. Because it is not typical of rooms. It is not typical of hangovers either. So that makes it unusual. A blurry, yellowish object hovering near the light bulb. Could it be that he was on some other planet where puke floats? No, no, it's too early for that. He tried to focus. It still didn't register.
Another puff. And then he saw. A bee. And not even the floating alphabet kinds. It was a bee, the insect kind. The kind that can smell fear. The kind that bites you for absolutely no reason whatsoever. What should he do? Neurons in his brain cells fail to fire, synapses collapse upon themselves, and seeing this, his brain decides to take control of the situation by pushing his eyeballs into his nostrils. Puff after puff after puff. Slowly, the blood makes it way back to his brains.
And in a moment of glorious certainty, he knows what he must do: Kill the bee. He celebrated this thought by doing nothing for a few minutes.
And then, he saw that the bee was hovering near a wall. In a flash of movement which would have made Jackie Chan cough politely, he picked up a shoe and hurled it at the wall with such a tremendously high force, that the bee had become a two-dimensional object for a brief instant of time, thereby defying all the laws of physics as we know it.
The shoe fell to the floor with a triumphant thud, and the bee remained there, stuck to the wall in a state of microcosmic indecision. But before he could take a final puff of the cigarette to celebrate the death of this manifestation of annoyance, there was a sound.
Buzzzzttttt...
He looks, towards the window. Moving in a somewhat constrained vertical area, and constantly bumping against the glass, is another bee. A moment to reflect makes him wonder why, despite thousands of years of glass in homes, and thousands of years of bees getting into people's homes, they never figured out that if you fly in a direction where everything seems clear, and you are suddenly blocked by an invisible force, that constantly bumping your head against it will not make it go away. Much in the same way for humans, that if the batteries die in a remote control, pressing the buttons harder will not bring it back to life. How come the bees never realized that there is such a thing as GLASS?
But back to his mission. A quick survey of the impromptu war zone: the kitchen sink, a travel mug, underwear (its reason for being present in the kitchen at that moment is irrelevant to just about everything), an empty bottle, and a spoon.
Calmly, so as not to surprise the already dumbfounded bee, he walked into the kitchen, and picked up the travel mug. He took its cover off. In a smooth upward movement of the mug against the window, he had the bee inside it, and quickly put the cover on.
He turned the faucet on, and through the filling hole in the mug's cover, he let the water go in. He reveled in the pleasure of imagining how the bee would be feeling, as it felt the water rise. The bee would be hovering upwards to stay above the water, just until it met the cover of the mug. Trapped, it would frantically be flying about looking for an escape, and finding none. And then the water would close in. Struggling, it would still hope for a chance, and get none. The struggling would stop. No more flying, no more breathing. And so the bee remained there, suspended in the water, until our valiant hero, satisfied, poured it down the toilet and flushed it out of existence.
With a smile and the aura of the pleasure still with him, he decided to check his email.
The world seems to be back to normal now. Or is it? A sudden "buzzzt" of sound, and before he knew it, a bee flying in from some unknown location of the room whacked against the screen of the laptop. He jumped back in his chair, startled. For a moment. A bee whacked against the screen of his laptop. Against the SCREEN OF HIS LAPTOP.
Rage. Pure rage and hatred filled him up. A creature the size of his thumb with the intellectual capacity equivalent to that of a pop singer had dared to touch the screen of his laptop.
He regained his composure, and contemplated a plan to make the bee suffer for this. A can of deodorant was his weapon of choice, and this he aimed at the bee, now nearing the open door from which it had entered. But no, it would not know freedom now.
He let loose an aerodynamic stream of an irresistible, masculine fragrance that would last for a very long time, and had the bee escaped at that moment, it could have gotten all the female bees and the queen bees (together) it wanted for its whole life without having to work a single day.
But that would not be the case here. The force of the spray was strong, it's force kept the bee in place, and the alcohol in the irresistible, masculine fragrance reacted with the bee's wings, slowly and steadily. The wings shriveled up into sickly little things, and the bee fell to the floor, wondering why it was standing instead of flying. It tried and tried to fly, but nothing seemed to work. Content with knowing that nothing was working, it started walking around a bit.
But destroying its wings was only part of his plan. Our protagonist picked up a matchstick and a pair of tweezers nearby. He placed the matchstick horizontally over the bee, holding it in place. Using the tweezers, he slowly, and making sure that the bee understood that it was being done slowly, plucked its legs out. The pluck was not an instantaneous one either. He'd hold the leg, pull it until it stretched, and could stretch no more. It would snap, and he had a bee leg in the tweezers. Beauty.
Systematically, enjoying the treatment being meted out to his prisoner, he took four legs out, one after the other. And then he gave it freedom by letting it go. A freedom which no one should ever have to accept, and which therefore made it a sweet form of torture. The blasphemer bee made feeble attempts at what it would term "crawling" around, but all it could manage to do was end up traveling along a circular path.
He poked and prodded the bee from time to time to make sure that the bee knew that it was supposed to be suffering.
The bee stopped crawling, and in a moment that seemed almost out of the ordinary, when things happen that don't usually happen, the bee turned ever so slightly and cocked its head to face its tormentor. They stared at each other. He looked at the bee, fire burning in his eyes, knowing that the time had come. The bee, looked at its tormentor, and hated him. Gazes locked.
After what seemed like an endless moment, he blinked. He looked at the bee. He picked up his mobile phone, and crushed the bee's head.
