Joe Buckingham

City of the Apiformes

a.k.a. Why I Shouldn’t Be Allowed To Dream

The bees had settled in to life in their new city with alarming ease. They flew in and out of buildings, occasionally flashing out of visibility and reappearing elsewhere; their ability to find shortcuts in the fourth dimension irritated and unnerved us, as it always had. 

“This is not good.” he said, folding his furry grey arms over his rotund belly. “Not good at all.” I nodded in agreement. Two sentient species in the same ecosystem was never a good idea. 

“Today they build a city. Tomorrow? What then? We’re fucked.” he continued, his nose twitching agitatedly.

“I think you’re being a little melodramatic.” I interjected, in an attempt to try and ease tension. “We still have the advantage of size. And we’ve got more technology than they do. We’ve been around for centuries, they’ve only just built their first city.”

“But look how fast they built it! It just sprung up out of fucking nowhere! We have no idea what they’re capable of.” 

“You’re over-reacting. This isn’t our problem anyway. We’ll go to the council, and they’ll decide wha…”

I wake up.

Clockwork

The clocks march on, unfalteringly marking out the seconds before our eventual, inevitable demise. And yet, their purpose is beaten into brutal, hopeless futility by the fact that we can never truly know when exactly it will take place.

It will happen. That much is certain; one of the few unerring truths we have left. But how many times the pendulum will swing between the beginning and the end of our all-too-brief storyline will remain a mystery until it is far too late for the knowledge to be of any use to us. So we’re left with no choice, nothing to do but count the seconds, the hours and the years, and wonder when, at last, it will happen.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

[In related news, my great uncle died this evening. I barely knew the guy, I’m not sure I ever actually spoke to him more than twice. But it was the most sudden death of a relative I’ve experienced, and it got me thinking… that, plus the fact I’m lying awake in a room with four loudly ticking wind-up clocks, provided the inspiration for this.]