Dinosaur Bees

_____ _______
Ella Longpre

I WILL NEVER refer to him with anything other than his full name.

I find myself strange, and my body unable to formulate any emission—sound, fluid, energy. I cannot sleep, my eyes won’t close, inert, shocked open.

I saw him, once.

I saw him on ++++++ Street. After making associations and doing math, I am sure that it was one of the first days of 2004.

This was my second time in the city. I was wandering, hoping to find a record store. I was still a teenager. I was sick. I had begun to lose my family. I was enrolled in college. I was all of these things.

I had watched _______ with my younger stepbrothers several times when it came out on video, when I was a younger teenager, and in the few years following. They especially loved it when the ______________ guy fakes a seizure. Since we had a bootlegged copy from which a neighbor had edited foul language and nudity, my mother allowed them to put it on once a day. At first, I let it play in the background while I washed the dishes. Eventually I was drawn to _______________’s poise, her bolt blue eyes, the fact that she owned her own house, and I began to linger longer in the living room on breaks between glasses and plates, letting the dish rag drip on the floor as the dishwater cooled and lost its suds.

_____ _______ was the shining core of the movie. He played a secondary character. He was the comic relief in an action film. His character description would read “street smart.” But he was very soft, vulnerable, precarious, as if he did know so much about the streets, it was threatening to crush him.

My mother reminded me that she had liked him on the show ____________. I remembered that we had started watching the show regularly after he joined the cast.

One rare Sunday, I was home alone while everyone else drove to Detroit. I put on another movie, ________________, while I dusted and vacuumed the trailer. We had owned it on video since I was very little, but I hadn’t watched it in years. It was a war movie, a period piece, two cassettes long. And there he was, _____ _______, alongside ____________.

When I saw him approaching on ________ Street, then, I recognized his face. I couldn’t recall his name.

He was wearing all black, with a silver cross. He looked tired. I was tired. I reminded myself to look away, but he had already seen me. As he passed, he nodded at me, his flat grey eyes in his tired sagging head, and I could only mimic him.

When I went back to my dorm room, I looked up his name on the internet. I saw that he hadn’t made a movie recently. Then I saw that his ________ girlfriend, the _______ of his ____, had been shot and killed in 1999, in their home. Looking at the gap in dates, it became very clear to me that he had stopped working after her death.

I didn’t think of him often until 2005, just a year later. I went to see ______, a sequel to an original that _____ _______ hadn’t been in. But there he was. He had aged. Not gracefully. Not romantically.

He was working again. The theatre was nearly empty. The movie was not good. I was happy for him.

I mentioned him, a few times after that, to friends I knew would understand. I told _____. She asked what he was up to now. I wasn’t sure.

Tonight, in 2010, I sat down to write this story. I still hadn’t looked up _____ _______’s filmography, or his biography, any information about him. I paused and noted that he hadn’t yet had his big screen comeback that seemed so inevitable in 2005. I wondered if he was working on the stage. If he was taking an extended vacation from work. If he was maybe training young boxers in IIIIIIIIIIII at a gym near my ex-girlfriend’s old apartment. I entered _____ _______ in a search engine.

_____ _______ died in 2004. After I saw him on ________ Street. In ____, across the country. Of a _______ overdose. I hadn’t realized when I saw him in ______, in the empty theatre, that he was already dead. I saw him on ________ Street, and two months later, he died, with a ______ and a bag of _______ next to his ____, a rubber _________ tied around his ___.

ELLA LONGPRE comes from Michigan and California. She lives in Massachusetts. She writes and makes music. This is her first publication.