Seventh Ocean Media

Dear Journal,

Before Teacher Petalia left for the new Neverzone with little Gloria and the Joneses, she suggested to me that — well, strike that, everyone who participates in Toxins Anonymous is recommended to have a journal on hand, just to have the option of another outlet when we are at our loneliest. (SIGH) Loneliness, that’s a concept that I am all too familiar with, even with the new friends I have made since my exile from my home hive; well, I guess I should say hives, plural. My last name is Wasp, but I am also half bee; a hybrid wasp. My mother, rest her dear soul, was a lovestruck honeybee Countess of the Neverhive Kingdom, who followed her heart, no matter where it took her. I do not know much about the relationship she had with her first husband, but my father, a working-class drone wasp, even I don’t see what she saw in him. Nevertheless, whether he appreciated her enough or not, which I do not believe he did, mother loved him and the children they bore together.

I honestly believe that we were the reason my mother stayed with Walter Wasp; I will NEVER, EVER call him “daddy” ever again; but I’ll get to that in a bit. My twin sister Whitney and I were their first children of this marriage. Walter’s oldest sons, Walter Junior and Wallace, I’ve never met them more than a few times, and I guess that makes them the smartest of his kids, jumping ship when they had the chance. On our mother’s side, I am happy to say that Whitney, Warote, Wendy, and I (all of us being full-blood siblings) have two half-sisters who actually have hearts. There was a brother that we never knew about, either; his name was Baxter, and I think he might have been our mother’s eldest hatchling. No one ever speaks of him, at least when I’m around; nor are there any pictures or trace of him ever being alive. Babs, the second eldest sibling, was the only reason I ever learned of Baxter in the first place.

When Whitney and I were larvae, I often wondered whether either of us were adopted, I never really thought that we were sisters; not with how aggressive she was. I was, what the Wallys called, a pansy petal, which, I guess is meant to be some sort of insult? Weak. I always dreamed of being a honey crafter, ever since mother took me on a special trip to the Neverhive Kingdom when I was very small. I always thought it was a dream, but Berna and Bailey were the ones who remembered that I had visited them with my mother when I was little. I was relieved to know I was not crazy. I was warned by one of mom’s relatives, whom I know now as Uncle Boston, an earl, that what I saw on that trip that day, I could never speak of with anyone in my home hive. Who expects a toddler larva to be able to keep a secret? That always seemed more of a Voidian slip.

My uncle was an eccentric bee, but he was a loyal, proud, and patriotic soldier for both our family and for the Neverscape Royals. I wish I had more time with him, as he is far older and weaker now; but he gave me a special gift after I was exiled from the Wasp Empire: a special oar that I use to help my cousins stir and create honey. Unfortunately, it was in part because of that that I became more miserable than when Walter kicked me out. I will never forget that day; one of my Aunt Beeatrix’s advisors called me up to his office in the north tower, not giving me a single detail, and he showed me some pictures of some of the hive’s citizens, taken at urgent care stations around the island. He had two other advisors in there with him; bees who I thought I could trust in the past. They accused me of poisoning batches of the Hive’s honey; accidental or purposeful, it still held the same consequences. I tried to get my cousins or my aunt to come to my aid, but these monsters told me I had no recourse with them, that they ran the parliament, I had never been as upset as I was then. I felt like my wings had been clipped, and no one cared.

That was when I was at my lowest; two kingdoms I had been exiled from in the course of two Neveryears. I was the niece of the Queen, but I was dragged out by securibees, who threatened to imprison me because I wasn’t able to fly away at that moment. I was so enraged and angered, there were even times when I jabbed them with my words, telling them to go to bee hell and called another a buttface, or something. I was not in the best frame of mind; but I lost a piece of my soul that day. Berna and Bailey did share that they believed me, and they knew that there were safeguards and protocols that I had adhered to that would have made it impossible for even a swamp monster to contaminate the honey. Even with their faith in me, I was unable to pull myself back up, until I met her; Petalia.

My sisters and cousins had known Petalia for quite a while, and credited her for averting the greatest honey famine in our kind’s history. I don’t know how I made it through those lonely two weeks before the group reconvened. I was so shy, and I felt so vulnerable that I was afraid to even speak; I think the only words I remember saying at the beginning of the meeting were some timid squeaks. I had never felt so pathetic in all my life; but, as I looked back on my life, I never realized how little I knew about the real world; how other Neverbeings managed to pass themselves off as normal, find relationships and maintain them, and find happiness. I had addressed these concerns with Petalia and with Lady Sal Sol, a dear friend of the Neverhive. Surprisingly enough, I felt at home with this group of Neverbeings; I didn’t at first, though.

All their stories of being misunderstood, misrepresented, and their own personal struggles, I felt that I could relate, but at the same time, I felt like what I went through was not comparable to them in either way. There was Conroy the Bat, who had severe insomnia because he lived in an orphanage and his venom released when he was asleep; Ross the Rattler, one of the co-founders of TA, accidentally nicked the wing of a girl he was in love with, with his fangs, nearly poisoning her to death. Celia the Spider, a dear soul who was half spider and half Hopper, kind of like me; who faced the horrible stigma that comes with being a black-widow spider, whose poison was benign. Samantha Scorpion is probably the one member that I can relate to the most; she was exiled from her clutch, but for even less of a reason than I was: she has these gorgeous eyes, one blue and one gold; which meant to the other scorpions taht she was some kind of a demon. Then there’s poor Acidney, who wanted a better life and left her home on Croaxic Island and came here, not realizing that her mere touch is corrosive and deadly. In spite of all that, we have moved forward as a group and made new friends.

I long for the days when I had no worries; no cares; and not having this feeling of immense inferiority. There are few creatures that I can trust, and even fewer who are willing to put their trust in me. I wear the gear that was issued to me on my first day with TA, and that is still not enough. I wish that I could read emotions like my friends can; I feel that there is little about the outside world that I am adequately prepared for. Whether Berna and Bailey make good on their word to prove my innocence is another. I even went so far as to wrote an apology scroll to the reprobates that judged me and stole my life from me, for the way I acted. I wanted that piece of my soul that they stole by riling me up in such a surreptitious manner. They acted the way the Empress of my old hive operates; racking up tallies of what her subjects do wrong, and rather than find a way to problem-solve, she lashes out at us, not taking the time to even wonder if or why there was a reason for these mistakes or transgressions. As I sit here and write this — and it’s not easy when you have no opposable limbs — I cannot help but feel that there is no light at the end of this tunnel, that I am doomed to wander around in the dark, never to find comprehension, understanding, and decency ever again.

Signed, Winona