Everything Is Awful

by Matt Bellassai

  I cursed the bee under my breath and brushed his corpse off my heel, and that’s when I noticed the hole he’d crawled out of, in the middle of the pile of dirt upset by my feet, and the other holes around it, all teeming with other bees newly incensed by my presence.

  It was their nest, I realized, and I’d crushed it with my thumping foot. I’d run right into their hive, I’d killed one of their brothers, and now they were angry.

  Now, I should pause to point out that this is one of the many ways in which humanity is no match for nature: there are fucking underground beehives. As in, bees that live in the fucking ground. I’d also like to take this moment to formally accuse Winnie the Pooh of failing to prepare me for this phenomenon. Thanks to Winnie, I’d spent years going about life assuming delicious honey-producing beehives were found exclusively aboveground, and I fully blame him for my ignorance on this subject. But it took only a few moments for me to draw a few clear conclusions about underground beehives, or rather, one very important conclusion: underground beehives do not like getting stepped on. In fact, they very much dislike getting stepped on, so much so that when they are stepped on, they happen to overreact and, despite their trespasser’s loud and fervent attempts at de-escalation, attack accordingly.

  The bees rose up in unison and set about swarming not just me, but all of us children, in retaliation. Sure, I was the one who had destroyed their nest, but they attacked us all without asking questions. Our parents watched from afar as we all came screaming back to the house, bringing the swarm with us, wailing like mad as the cloud of bees chased after us. The bees stung and bit any exposed limb with impunity as we ran, our arms flailing, swinging whatever objects we could to knock out as many bees as possible at once. When we reached the house, everybody scrambled indoors, yelping at the final stings, swinging away the most committed soldiers.

  Inside, the house became a full-blown triage unit, like the kind you see in movies about the Civil War, with soldiers lying in filthy beds, biting into chunks of wood while nurses saw off their exploded legs. All of us children collapsed onto the ground in various states of panic and pain, cries and screams piercing the air. It was utter madness.

  I’m not proud to admit that I managed, somehow, to escape with only the single initial sting, while everybody else wailed in pain around me. Naturally, of course, I was the only one to have stepped on a bee, which is a lot like accidentally shooting off your foot with a rifle. But I couldn’t let on that I’d caused this whole mess and made off with only a single wound, so I writhed alongside everybody else.

  Still, I remain convinced that there were at least twelve other things to blame before me, including the snake, the cousin who spotted the snake, Winnie the Pooh, and most of all, the cottage itself, which I continue to believe is cursed.

  • • •

  The trips to Michigan continued year after year, my family’s enthusiasm undisturbed by mass bee attacks, poop rivers, and ongoing feuds. And the curse showed no signs of relenting either.

  Two summers after the bee attack, when our wounds finally showed signs of healing, I went to the cottage with my aunt, uncle, and cousins a night early. My parents and brother were driving up the next morning, but I begged and pleaded to hitch a ride the night before, reminding my mother that without me in the car, she could fill my seat with another twenty, maybe even thirty, dinners, plus any number of extra breads, fruit platters, wrapped pies, and brownie trays, and I just couldn’t imagine us surviving the week with anything less. Of course, she relented, if only to get me to stop listing foods, and let me go.

  I felt guilty that night, once we arrived, to have the entire bedroom to myself. I could sleep in the real bed instead of an air mattress, and snore as loud as I wanted without retribution, and in the morning, I could wake up and eat breakfast and be outside to swim long before my family would arrive.

  There were moments when I loved going to Michigan, and this was one of them. Besides everything that was wrong with it, the cottage could still be a fun place to be. It may not have been Disneyland, but it was better than nothing, and I made the most of it when I could.

  That night, my cousins and I plotted what we would do with all the extra time we’d have together in the morning. We could go fishing, which amounted to standing at the end of the long, rickety pier that jutted from the shore into the shallow water in front of the cottage and waiting for a fish the size of a baby’s shoe to decide life wasn’t worth living. (I will never understand the thrill of fishing. At its very best, it’s an activity that ends with a vicious struggle to reel in something you can easily buy at a supermarket. And then what? You take a picture with it? So you can make that picture the cover of your dating profile? Nobody is impressed with your ability to catch a fish. Turtles can catch fish. Nobody is trying to fuck a turtle.) Besides fishing, we could also go tubing, but tubing is only fun for about five minutes, until you hit a small wave and are violently catapulted into the air and come crashing down into the water like you’re diving into a plate of frozen steaks, and suddenly there is water in orifices you didn’t know existed. The only real option was to go for an early boat ride, and the only boat we could operate ourselves was the paddleboat, the water version of a bicycle, really just exercise disguised as fun. But still, we could ride it out to the middle of the lake where the water was deepest and jump in without fear of getting grabbed by anything lurking at the bottom.

  So that morning, we all got up and threw on our swim trunks. After breakfast, we took the requisite two hours to slather on SPF 1000 sunblock, a ritual that always proved pointless for our pale Anglo skin.

  I walked the fifty yards to the lake while I waited for my cousins to finish smearing their pasty bodies, and waded a few feet into the water around the paddleboat. It was a beautiful morning—crisp, you might say, if you used words like that to describe the air and not a potato chip. The water felt brisk and refreshing, like swimming in a cold glass of lemonade, if that’s your thing. It was the type of morning that made coming to this mess of a place worth it.

  And then I took a single step into the water and the beauty of the morning came rupturing to a close. I felt a shooting pain in the bottom of my foot—once again, stepping had proven to be my greatest weakness; if only I owned a pair of shoes—and when I lifted my foot from the water to look, there was a slice, almost two inches in length, along my heel. I’d stepped directly onto a shard of glass and cut my heel almost wide open.

  If I’d had the fortitude in the moment, there are plenty of people I’d like to have cursed, namely myself for daring to think going outside was ever, ever a good idea, but also whichever redneck, yahoo motherfucker decided to throw a motherfucking broken bottle of shitty beer into a fucking lake. I can imagine plenty of terrible things a person can do, like getting a tattoo of another person’s face or drinking even a single swig of milk a second after the expiration date, but throwing a shard of jagged glass into the shallow part of a lake is among the worst of them, and not just because I happened to step on it, even though that maybe had something to do with it. Seriously, fuck you, sir or madam. I hope one day you step on something even worse, like a really hot beach or one of those extra-long Legos.

  I was surprisingly calm in the moment, perhaps because the water was washing away the blood, and I limped the fifty yards back up to the house, where my aunt was sitting on the deck drinking her morning coffee.

  “Uhh, Auntie Bonnie,” I said. “I think I cut my foot.”

  By then, my aunt Bonnie was well used to my injuries. Virtually every time I was left in her charge, I’d come limping back to her with some broken bone, sprain, burn, or open wound. It became a running joke in the family that she should refuse to look after me because I posed too much of an insurance risk. My injuries were so routine that she barely blinked when I told her I’d cut my foot.

  “I’ll go get a Band-Aid,” she sighed without looking up at me.

  I don’t know why I didn’t stop her and say, “Listen, lady, t
here’s no time for Band-Aids, we need Super Glue and maybe also a miracle,” but she was a pharmacist, which is basically a doctor, so I trusted her. Either way, she was gone before I could say anything. A few minutes later, she returned with a bandage.

  By then, there was a small pool of blood forming beneath me, and her eyes widened ever so slightly as she got closer, in that way that adults’ eyes tend to widen when they realize things are more fucked than they’d originally realized, but don’t want to admit it out loud.

  “Oh,” she said with a kind of forced composure. “You really cut it, huh?”

  She tried to say it calmly, but I have a knack for picking up on the panic in people’s voices, especially when they’re staring at an open wound in my body, and I could tell what she really meant to say was, “We’ll be lucky if we can save the leg.”

  She used a water bottle to clear the blood away, and tried to see how deep the cut was, but when she peeled back the skin for just a moment, she let out the faintest of gasps. I could see what she saw, too. A dark spot, maybe a piece of dirt—that lake was filthy, after all, hence the broken beer bottle—but it looked more like part of a vein, maybe even an artery, and even though I don’t entirely know the difference between a vein and an artery, or whether there are even arteries in your feet (who knows!), it looked bad, like what you’d imagine cutting an artery would look like. I went pale. The blood kept coming.

  “Let’s just call your mom,” Aunt Bonnie said, but I knew what she really meant: “Think about what you’d like to say to your mother before you die.”

  I could hear her dialing the phone. By now, my parents would be on their way to the cottage, the car bounding down the highway with bottles of beer rattling in the seat where I would’ve been uncomfortably squished otherwise.

  “Hey, Deb,” she said almost calmly when my mother answered. “Are you guys close?”

  “Almost,” my mother said. “Why? Is everything OK?” Debbie, always assuming the worst has happened.

  “Yep, everything’s good,” Aunt Bonnie said. Even though she really meant, “You left your dainty, fragile piece-of-shit son with me, and now he’s going to die.”

  I could tell she didn’t want to get my mother worried, especially not when there was nothing she could do, not from the highway at least. And to be perfectly honest, I was fine with her not knowing. My mother is a notoriously worried woman, and I knew the second she learned I’d nearly cut off my foot, she’d go on and on about how we never should have been allowed near that water without military-grade protective body suits, at least three adult supervisors, and a written permission slip from a medical professional. My mother absolutely insisted that we all wear water shoes, those disgustingly ugly mesh clogs that meld to your feet the second they get wet. I hated water shoes. I hated that they filled with dirt and sand and gave my feet a rash. I hated that they made my feet feel heavy and dull. I hated the hideous colors they were designed in. And I hated knowing that I would now almost certainly never hear the end of it.

  Aunt Bonnie looked at me the way you look at a bird that’s flown into a window and broken its wing, the look that says, “You’ll be dead within the hour, you poor idiot.”

  “Let’s go to the bathroom and see if we can clean it out,” she said.

  And so, I hobbled to the bathroom, my cousins now crowded around me, and placed my bloody stump under the bathtub faucet. Aunt Bonnie bent down and tried spreading the wound so the water could clean inside of it. I could tell she was trying to see if the dark spot was going away, if it was only a piece of dirt, and not an open artery spilling out the last of my life force. The spot wouldn’t go away. The bleeding had somewhat abated, but it hadn’t stopped entirely. We wrapped it in paper towels.

  Aunt Bonnie picked up the phone again. I could tell her concern was growing. She’d had a perfect record so far, in terms of making sure I hadn’t died, but this time was shaping up differently. I mean, all told, even if I had died (spoiler alert: I didn’t die), her record still would’ve been pretty good. One death out of mostly not dying is not too bad.

  She dialed my mother again, and I could hear her answer.

  “Hey, Deb,” Aunt Bonnie said, less convincingly calm this time. “Almost here?”

  “We’re five minutes away,” my mother said. “Something’s wrong, I can tell.”

  “Well,” Aunt Bonnie said. “There’s been an incident.”

  A moment passed while my mother waited for news that I’d been decapitated, castrated, or worse.

  “Well, Matthew stepped on a piece of glass, and uh . . . he might have cut an artery.”

  “AN ARTERY!?” I could hear my mother scream through the phone.

  “Yeah, maybe just a little bit,” Aunt Bonnie said.

  But my mother was already crying. My father, you could hear, was yelling from the driver’s seat, “Goddammit! It’s always fucking something!”

  “Oh, God. Why are you crying?” my brother was asking from the backseat.

  “Auntie Bonnie said he cut an artery!” my mother was sobbing. “Do you want me to scream like he’s doing?”

  The dog, I’m sure, vomited one last time.

  This is how my family reacts to news.

  A few minutes later, the car came shrieking down the gravel road. My mother leapt from the passenger seat, and before I had a chance to say hello, I’d been swept into the backseat, boxes of groceries tossed onto the pavement to make room for my failing body, and we were speeding back down the gravel road to the emergency room.

  • • •

  “You just need a few stitches” is what the doctor said when he’d finally had a chance to look me over.

  “Are you sure, Doctor?” my mother was asking. “Are you sure he hasn’t cut an artery?”

  I would make fun of her for questioning the doctor on something that would be obvious to a doctor, but then again, this was small-town Michigan. The hospital was in between a Dairy Queen and a Blockbuster Video.

  “Um. Yes,” he said. “He’d be dead if he cut an artery.”

  A tetanus shot, a handful of stitches, and a bagful of prescription painkillers later, we were driving back to the cottage, the open green fields of Michigan passing by the window.

  I’d like to say I found a new appreciation for those views, the kind of appreciation that people who have faced death feel. I’d like to say I looked out that window and said something profound, something that someone who’s really gone through stuff says, like “You never know how much you’ve been missing until you almost lose it all.”

  But I couldn’t say that.

  All I could muster, before the pain drugs took over, was one simple sentence:

  “This never would’ve happened if we just went to fucking Disneyland.”

  ON THE TERRORS OF NATURE

  I’ve never understood people who actually enjoy being outdoors. I understand you can’t exactly avoid going outside. I admit I leave my apartment for ten minutes every day to retrieve sandwiches and cookies to drag back to my lair. But I certainly don’t have fun doing it. Outside is where the sun’s piercing rays sear my skin. Outside is where spiders breed and plot ways to penetrate my kitchen. Outside is where bears live. Like actual bears that roam around waiting to rip your arms and legs off and eat them like stale chicken wings. If I didn’t need nutrition or occasional sunlight to survive, rest assured my apartment door would stay permanently bolted.

  My distaste of nature began as early as I can remember, during one disastrous weekend my family spent RVing in Wisconsin. In their youthful naiveté, my parents not only enjoyed being outdoors but actively sought time to be outside exclusively, like some kind of forest animals, content with only the trees and a bonfire and a fully equipped RV. I was never on board with the concept of the RV, even as an infant, when I still regularly shit my pants. If you’re putting an entire house on wheels just to drive it into the woods, why don’t you just stay in the fucking house? You can call it a recreational vehicle all you want, but
an RV will always be the vehicle you don’t want to drive behind on the highway because there’s a 100 percent chance that an infant child is giving you the middle finger from the rear window. I was that infant child. And that middle finger was my cry for help. I like to point out this fact to clarify that I myself was never an RVer, simply the child of RVers and an unwitting participant in the culture of RVing. And yes, RVing is not just an activity, but an entire culture, with a rich history of camping in Walmart parking lots and dumping buckets of piss and shit on the side of the American interstate highway system. It’s a beautiful culture, respected by many, and disrespected by many more.

  My parents never owned an RV, but our family friend Sue owned one, and that was good enough for us. Sue was an old, sprightly woman who worked with my parents years earlier at the department store where they met. (Yes, my parents met working at a department store. I am a child of coupons and cheap garments.) By the time I was born, Sue was already widowed and retired, and spent her free time driving out into the wilderness to enjoy nature. I loved Sue. She had a nasty sense of humor—most of the time, I didn’t know what she was laughing about, but I laughed along with her anyway. She had a bunch of cactuses in her house that were taller than I was and a full basement with a pool table and a bunch of paintings of clowns that when the lights were turned off I’m pretty sure sprang to life to feast on cubes of beef and carrion that Sue flung to them from upstairs. She was a quirky old broad who would do stuff like that.

  “The camper,” as it was affectionately called, was always parked in Sue’s driveway. We were never allowed inside of it when we were at Sue’s house—just like we only got to go to the basement while the clown paintings were sleeping—but I’d always wondered what happened inside of it. I was probably only four or five at the time, but I remember being fascinated by the idea that someone would actually want to fit an entire house onto a big old bus and take it into the wilderness for fun. But of course, we soon got invited to go with Sue on a camping trip, and I would discover exactly why fitting your entire house onto a bus is perhaps not the most ideal arrangement.