Dinosaur Bees

Last Day
Ella Longpre

I AM IN SCHOOL. It’s the last day. Amanda takes me from the biology room and we play guitars all hour in a strange place.

In Mrs. Elford’s algebra class, we go on a secret field trip to a mall. Everyone leaves me behind. I am left standing in a walkway, and there are people in bright vinyl bodysuits climbing the walls of one of the nearby stores. One of them scales down the wall and walks in my direction, past a crowd of silent assistants. She is wearing a dark pink and grey suit with a purplish-pink helmet and pink aviator sunglasses. Before she passes me, she looks at me, smiles, and shakes my hand.

“Kate Hudson,” she says. (I think Kate Hudson is supposed to be an actress.)

I beam. She walks away.

One of the other climbers also leaves the wall and the crowd of assistants. He is in an orange and yellow suit. He approaches me and takes off his helmet. He stops to take my hand. I recognize his face.

“Hi. I’m Tom Cruise. What’s your name?”

I tell him, and he says, “Cool, I’ll see you later.”

He must think I am a new silent production assistant.

Later, back in Mrs. Elford’s class, I am telling everyone what happened. Desirae says she saw the climbing actors and they introduced themselves to her, too. I know she is lying—she wants to be important, like me.

Mrs. Elford shows me a pamphlet. “Just wait till you fly over to where they’re shooting this.” It’s information on the next Julia Roberts movie. She tells me she’s flying me over to the set to meet Ms. Roberts. Confused, I agree.

I come home from school to find all six of my dogs outside. It is dark, so it takes me a while to round them up. The last one to amble up the steps is the puppy who doesn’t have a name. Suddenly, I realize I can name her Valerie, after the foreign exchange student from Chile.

“I’ll call her Valerie and then it will rhyme with the other one, Mallory. Mallory and Valerie. Valerie and Mallory.”

I go inside and the house is silent. I think that maybe everyone has gone to bed. I walk into the master bedroom and bathroom to check on things. It is pitch black, but everything seems fine. I go back out into the laundry room.

Suddenly, Queeny comes running from the master bathroom, whining. She runs back and forth, from the bathroom, to the bedroom, to the laundry room, and back. I hurry into the bathroom.

“What is it, Queeny?”

I turn on the light. There is a waist-high platform in front of the sink. I cannot tell what the platform is made of, because there is a cover over it that drapes to the floor. The cover looks like a huge version of one of those bibs they put around your neck at the dentist’s when you’re about to get an X-ray. Underneath the cover is a human-sized figure. Part of the figure is peeking out—it is an egg-sized thing, wrapped with a sticker. I pull down a bit of the cover and see that the platform is a dentist’s chair. I pull down a bit more of the cover. This egg-sized thing is attached to something that looks like a skinny neck, but is clammy and pale, pickled. I take scissors from the counter and slash at the neck-thing to see what is underneath the mock skin. Blood comes pouring out of the thick slit and I hear a moan under the wrap. I begin to peel the sticker off of the egg-thing, like you would peel the shell off of a hard-boiled egg. I realize that it is my mother’s head. But there is no hair, and as I uncover where the face should be, there are no features, only a long hole in place of a mouth. The skin is puckered and damp, like the neck. As if it had been underwater a long time, pruned. I hear someone behind me.

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