Our New Bees Have Been Installed

I would have taken a video for y’all, but these bees were in pretty poor shape.  We thought at first that half of them had died overnight.
…and the bees had been stressed.  They get driven here from California via truck, and the last shipment?  Well, the truck got stuck in a Nevada tunnel for a couple of hours, and carbon monoxide did them all in.  Five hundred boxes of bees, about 500,000 innocent insects, all perished.  So the second shipment got through, but I’d wager these bees had been boxed up for far longer than was good for them.
So we dumped them in.  Alas, Queen Right Colonies, our supplier, was out of Cordovan Queens, so these bees? A gentle Italian.  Who are the most popular breed of bees in this area.
The question I’ve been asked three times thus far is, “Are they mean bees?”  And the answer is, “We don’t know yet.”  Like any pet, it’ll take some time for them to settle in, at which point their personality will become known.  They’re from a gentle breed, but that’s no guarantee, and something could go wrong with the queen (as it did last year).  In any case, we’ve gotten gloves and better suits, so if they are mean, we’ll be ready for them.
In the meantime, we’ve harvested some honey from the old bees, which is a wreck.  It’s all full of gook and wax, in a thin trickle at the bottom of a food-grade bucket.  That said, there’s something magical about this honey just being here, and Erin, Gini, and I keep dipping our fingers in to get a taste of the local floral bouquet, the sweetness strange on our tongues.  We’ll filter that shit out, get a small bottle for Amal (I want my honey poem, dammit), and see what we can salvage.  It’s a messy process, but somehow vital and earth-affirming, this processed sweetness from nothing at all.

New Story! "Shoebox Heaven," In Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine!

“Shoebox Heaven” may be the most disturbing story I’ve ever written, and yet it’s strangely sweet. Even when it’s been rejected, I’ve had editors ask me, “So did that tale of the kid seeking his cat ever find a home?” It stuck with them.  (As contrary to popular belief, editors don’t always reject a story because it’s bad; sometimes they reject it because it doesn’t fit.)
And “Shoebox Heaven” is a weirdie – one where the whole universe has gone horribly wrong, and yet we’re all struggling along.  But enough sales pitch – here’s how it starts:

Andy found Oscar, his fur clotted with lint balls, behind the dryer.  Oscar’s body was still warm because he had curled up underneath the exhaust vent, but Momma told Andy that Oscar had been dead for hours — it was just old age, was all.  Andy wanted to pet Oscar, because Oscar’s head was still tucked underneath his paws.  It was like his cat was playing a game of hide and go seek.
Andy couldn’t understand why Momma was crying.  “Let’s go to the airport,” he said, “And fly to heaven, and get Oscar.”
So they did.

(I should add that the genesis of this story was started by my Godson Andy, who in fact precisely said that when he was four years old and his cat Oscar died.  This story’s dedicated to him, though even five years later he’s not quite ready to read this one.  But I wanted a better answer for Andy than the one his mother had to give.)
Anyway, I’m proud to announce that you can read my tale at Andromeda Spaceways InFlight Magazine, which previously published my story “The Backdated Romance.”  Andromeda is a great magazine, one of the best non-pro markets to sell to in my not-so-humble opinion, and the PDF/Epub/Mobi version of Issue #57 is a mere $4.99 – and you get tons of other cool stories to boot, as well as a poem from my Clarion Buddy Gillian Daniels.
Pick it up, if you like crazy trips to heaven with a cat in a glass shoebox.  I promise you the angels will scoff.