Some piles of soil had been dumped unexpectedly at the end of the dirt road blocking the entrance to the parking lot. She gradually added weight to her foot on the brake pedal to make a smooth stop before a mound. She came out the car, climbed up the mound, the empty parking lot, hidden behind the dirt mound appeared. At the end of vast concrete pavement the Botanist store was still lit. Some urge to urinate at the top of the mound, streams of another wild scent slipped along her legs, watched the liquid as part of nature with no shame. The fluid reached her feet, the greedy soil with hundred thirsty mouths, in a queue along the toes, soles, and arches, guzzled every drop, perfuming its entity with the long-time hope of the wild. The unsatisfied softened soil dragged down her feet inside, unable to hold, the thief stole her slippers.
She descended the mount. She found walking on the parking lot pleasant; looked down she was stepping on the harsh concrete and the weeds barefooted. She looked back to the dirt mound, noticed her red slippers were stuck in the soil at the top of the mound. Rough and partly spalled concrete squares were bordered weed-tufted in the gap between edges. She enjoyed the scratch of harsh weeds on her bare soles.
The heat in the car and the dance of the legs on the pedals had done the job perfectly. All the way on her legs from thighs down to feet was soaked with a bizarre combination of sweat and lubricant. As she was walking, the cold breeze was twisting around her claves, circling around the thighs, shamelessly going up and down, and then departed from the back with a heavy load of wild scents. The stream of cold breeze was dumping in progression its precious cargo along her way, making a tunnel of perfume behind, so intense that could distract a starved wild beast in chasing a prey.
A heavy look, she twisted on her heels in a sudden move, at far, behind the mound where she had missed her slippers, two glows of blue were gazing at her. “A human, a beast, or something that I do not know. Should I have the courage to walk there and take back my slippers from it?” She turned to the direction of the store, noticed a car was parked at the front of the store. As she was walking closer, it was a pickup truck with a cabin at the back. She looked through the window shield; nobody was behind the stirring wheel. She passed the truck, opened the door of the store, and entered.
5
The Empty Room
The botanist was sitting at the cashier; head down his index finger was playing with something on the cashier top. She walked closer; it was a dead bee. She stood by him waited for his attention. The botanist sniffed and raised his head. “It’s you again, I can call you my regular customer,” he said smilingly.
“This is only my second time.”
“Well, look around at the store, it is vacant.”
“So I deserve a good discount.”
“Of course you do. Especially, since you are wearing a swimsuit, I guess you really deserve a reward. How was the water? I see you are still wet.”
“What should I say? It is even strange to me why I have sweated so much in this cold night.”
“The other strange thing, you were not afraid to come here alone in this appearance. I should tell you something, people in solitude do strange things.”
“like?”
“I can show you something if you are not afraid of vaults.”
“It is just a room underground, isn’t it?”
“If I were an engineer, I would affirm you. Nevertheless, there is much more in that. It is where gods live. Have you ever thought of the original meaning of a vault: a chamber beneath a church or in a graveyard? Vaults were the worship temples of some believers. Alas, the men of truth were chained and imprisoned in their worship place to death; in the vaults. God lives underground, placing him in the sky is the politics of masters, as religion became so popular that myriad bowed in obedience. You may call it superstition which means the religion of believers in the past, who were killed in the battle of truth against lies.”
“Within twelve years of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, I was never taught of this conception in human mind.”
“So you speak with a different language. In that case, the translation is ‘dogs from the cellar.’ Men stayed for long in the isolation underground, cannot differ illusions from common sense. The only reality would be what they create in their mind. Down there, your deepest recollections of distressed childhood experiences find a way to funnel up and present itself as current reality.”
“And then?”
“You follow the inexplicable you don’t dare to think of upstairs.”
“Reveal your vault to me; I am not afraid of nightmares.”
The man stood up and walked through an aisle to the end of the hall where there was a huge freestanding storage shelf covering across the hall as an end wall. He went to the right end of the shelf, squeezed himself sideways through a narrow gap between the wall and shelf. She followed him in the same way. The shelf was stretched to the ceiling, only a dim light through the gap could hardly defy the darkness at the back. He switched the light on; it was a large area, quiet and vacant without any windows or doors.
He went straight to the far end corner of the area, stooped to reach a trapdoor cleverly camouflaged on the floor, pulled up the pull handle ring, and opened the door. He rotated the trapdoor about hinges and gently put it on the floor on its back. She went to the opening and looked down; a metal staircase was going down. “Let’s proceed,” he said showing the way down with his hand.
“Should I be afraid?”
“Don’t worry. All you see are legitimate types of criminal horrors.”
He went down the stairs, turned the light on. She followed him holding the handrail on the shaky metal staircase. There was a long corridor ran under store hall, a few doors were located along at one side. He opened the first door and went in, she followed, a huge area, the floor was filled with large flowerpots in aisles. She could see the remnants of dried flowers and plants on the pots. The floor of the aisles and all pots were hidden under a thick carpet of dead bees, in millions. The empty artificial bee hives were suspended from the ceiling over the pots area, aligned in rows.
As he was looking at the empty hives, said, “Have you ever thought why flowers smell good? The land plants evolved to flowering plants somewhere between 140 and 250 million years ago. The biological function of flowers is the reproduction, but it is not possible without the help of pollinators, the bees. The scent, a complex compound, emitted by flowers along with color is to attract pollinators. The problem was that bees had lived before flowers they didn’t need flowers. So my question was, and of which I could not free my mind, how flowers affected the evolution of bees to make them their slave workers. I posed a hypothesis: the volatile scent, which is a molecular compound, penetrates to DNA and alters the biology of the bees. Down there in their DNA had been a need for flowers in some hidden way, the scent activated, deciphered the code. The translation in our language: the bees remembered.”
He pointed to the floor, “The yellow and black carpet of this room displays the practice of trial and error leading to the failure of my hypothesis. The vegetarian bees died of hunger, never changed to honey bees. At the end, tired of one-year testing, I introduced the red-brown vulture bees for revenge; for sure they didn’t care for flowers, they attacked the plant bees took their flesh out through their eyes. I was watching their feast until they kill them all.”
“There is no horror in dead bees.”
“In a sense, you are right only if we are in a false belief that the notion of legality roots down in human biology. What if does proof of a certain hypothesis necessitate human samples rather than bees? In this case, the horror starts as you go further