Crawling out of my skin
In the afternoon
When my body is too much on fire to be lived in
And must be evacuated like a burning building
Because the fire alarm in my skin is wailing
And so creeping rusty-stair fire escape down my central nervous system:
A House for Bees
​
By notabeanie
The buzzing started in the afternoon. It would have been an empty afternoon. One with many things to do but with no mind for doing them. And so, she was sitting on the end of the bed. Pumping blood from her heart to her fingers for scrolling and her eyes for staring at her phone, and not doing much else.
And it happened so quietly at first. As if someone had turned up the volume on the silence between the street sounds and the fridge noises. She didn’t even notice that she was focusing harder. But then her muscles started clenching and her hands started grasping and when she finally remembered she had a body she discovered that it was annoyed. So she looked up to turn off whatever was making that horrible whine only to find that the noise was everywhere, and it was nowhere, and for a moment the room was buzzing.
And she thought that it was this vibration that was creeping in between her fingers and her teeth and toes. Creeping through her pores and under her skin. But then she understood that the noise was inside her and that she herself was vibrating with an insectoid whir, and because she had remembered that she had a body she found now that it was crawling, and when she tried to find her heartbeat she found that it was not beating but buzzing too as if instead of veins she had a subatomic train track. And it occurred to her to breathe and keep breathing, and to breathe and keep breathing but then the air turned burning and viscous inside her and then it was burning and yellow outside her too and her eyes rolled up into a honeycomb light and then everything was whirring and screaming and hot;
And that was the moment she crawled out of her skin.
Like a swollen thing bursting she simply stopped having edges. Where her body had been there was instant collapse into a mass of writhing things. Shiny insect bodies crawled out from under hairy insect legs and a multitude of tiny wings sliced the air until it was roaring; a rolling mass of bees, spilled over itself and onto the floor; bees rose like smoke, or like floods, or like fire, until the whole room was thick and moving and yellow. Bees poured out through cracks under doors and arounds windows and swarmed through the heaters and drains and pipes.
And eventually the roaring dulled into a whirr, and the whirring into a buzz, and as the last few bees struggled out through the holes in the baseboard the room was left still and quiet and empty almost as it was before.