Mellified Man
By E.S. Wynn


The bees have long since taken you as part of their hive, rarely sting you anymore. To them, you are wax, a sickly sweet fruit fattened with honey, succulent with dripping decay. To them, you are a thing to be winnowed through and hollowed. Each day the bees chew deeper, carve their latticework combs into muscle and tissue and stir winged and vibrating in rolling hordes beneath thinning skin. Tiny larvae stir within the marrow of sickening bone, roll slick and fat through meat as they gorge and grow.

The honey the workers of the hive gather and press against your organs sustains you somehow, prolongs your life into a tired, hazy darkness that haunts the edges of your eyes, teasing you, never taking you. Like a constant companion, the humming buzz of the bees permeates you, follows you as you drift into and out of hazy dreams of melting bodies and rotting, maggot-eaten minds. Like a constant companion, the buzz, the stirring of wings, of tiny bodies moving, slowly separating skin from muscle, crawling along layers of flesh like tiny, ravenous worms is eternal, never ceasing, never slowing.

For you, death may never come. For you, time may only pass as an eternal itching and buzzing, the slow, steady transformation into a living corpse of wax and honey, a mellified man, no longer human, no longer able to do more than draw slow, shallow breaths and stare murky into the darkness. For you, there will only be the loose and endless movements of the bees as they dance within the pale waxiness of a body that is no longer yours. For you, the taste of honey will linger forever at the edge of every sense, sickly sweet, the taste tainted with corruption, the rot of your own lost, mummified flesh.


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E.S. Wynn is the author of over thirty books.