#Lindy Biller

[citronreview-blog]

Our journal of brief literature beckons you to the fall season. https://citronreview.com/

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Photograph by Jill Katherine Chmelko

[ofallingstar]

31 horror movies directed by women (2010-2024) for the 31 days of Halloween

American Mary (2012) | dir. Jen & Sylvia Soska

Helter Skelter (2012) | dir. Mika Ninagawa

The Babadook (2014) | dir. Jennifer Kent

Fatal Frame (2014) | dir. Mari Asato

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) | dir. Ana Lily Amirpour

Evolution (2015) | dir. Lucile Hadžihalilović

The Invitation (2015) | dir. Karyn Kusama

The Lure (2015) | dir. Agnieszka Smoczyńska

The Love Witch (2016) | dir. Anna Biller

Raw (2016) | dir. Julia Ducournau

Revenge (2017) | dir. Coralie Fargeat

Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017) | dir. Issa López

The Long Walk (2019) | dir. Mattie Do

Saint Maud (2019) | dir. Rose Glass

Zana (2019) | dir. Antoneta Kastrati

Bulbbul (2020) | dir. Anvita Dutt

I Blame Society (2020) | dir. Gillian Wallace Horvat

Relic (2020) | dir. Natalie Erika James

The Fear Street Trilogy (2021) | dir. Leigh Janiak

Titane (2021) | dir. Julia Ducournau

We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021) | dir. Jane Schoenbrun

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) | dir. Halina Reijin

Fresh (2022) | dir. Mimi Cave

Huesera: The Bone Woman (2022) | dir. Michelle Garza Cervera

Birth/Rebirth (2023) | dir. Laura Moss

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023) | dir. Ariane Louis-Seize

Tiger Stripes (2023) | dir. Amanda Nell Eu

I Saw the TV Glow (2024) | dir. Jane Schoenbrun

Lisa Frankenstein (2024) | dir. Zelda Williams

The Substance (2024) | dir. Coralie Fargeat

Your Monster (2024) | dir. Caroline Lindy

Extended List

[nurtureliterary]

Hivesong

Lindy Biller

There was no chance I could be pregnant, literally none, but when the doctor said pregnancy would explain my symptoms—tender breasts, dizziness, the inability to stomach anything except water crackers and wildflower honey—I agreed to a test. What harm could it do?

My doctor had pinkish cheeks and hair like milkweed, fleecy white tufts. The softness of her face made the dislike in her eyes more piercing.

“Don’t worry,” she said, showing me the test results. “You have options.”

She thought I was lying. The dizziness rushed back, framed floral prints swirling into the clean white walls like sprinkles into cake batter. I thought of birthdays. Hugging my mother’s leg during thunderstorms. The doll I used to carry around everywhere, called Baby, who had my mother’s dark hair and dimpled cheeks. Her eyes were supposed to shut when you laid her down and open when you scooped her up, but they were defective. Always half open.

“I can’t be pregnant,” I said. “I haven’t been fucked in a year, at least.”

The fucked made my doctor smile, her first real one. The at least kept it from being a lie. She wheeled in a fetal monitor to listen for a heartbeat.

“A false positive is possible,” she said. “Rare, though.”

She squirted warm gel onto my stomach and pressed the wand against my skin, searching for you. The buzzing started out faint. As she pressed harder, the sound grew—not a heartbeat, but a wild humming. The doctor frowned. “Ouch,” I said, and she stopped pressing.

“The Doppler must be faulty.” She tried a new machine. The buzzing was louder. “It’s not a baby,” she said. “I’m not sure what it is.”

We scheduled an ultrasound—one week away, the soonest available. That night, I looked up natural ways to get rid of honeybees, an internet search that would probably put me on a government watchlist. I drank cinnamon garlic tea and citronella cocktails. I forced down spoonfuls of white vinegar.

On the day of my appointment, I was still dizzy. Nauseous in the mornings, with a new symptom—a permanent sweetness on my breath. As though my lungs had sprouted lilacs and soapwort. On the sonogram screen, the black-and-white picture morphed into a series of Rorschach tests. Clamshell, asteroid, butterfly.

Then the tech froze. We stared at the screen: a honeycomb, its geometry unmistakable. And there you were—dozens of you, maybe hundreds, small white blurs all working tenaciously, bumping together, pulling apart.

The tech rushed from the room and returned with my doctor, who looked at the screen, then back at me. Flowers tickled my throat. Soon there were others. Another doctor, the lady from the front desk, two more ultrasound techs. “This is a HIPAA violation,” said my doctor, the one with the milkweed hair, but no one left. No one spoke. My doctor pressed a hand to my abdomen. Not in a clinical assessment sort of way. In the way I rest my hand on the backs of chairs to steady myself, to remember that the earth is still beneath me.

Reporters found me within days, drawn as if to the scent of clover. They called me the Bee Mom. I declined to answer their questions, hoping they would lose interest, but every day they multiplied.

“What does it feel like?”

“Do you think they’ll survive?”

“What would you say to people who believe it’s all a hoax?”

“What would you say to people who believe?”

My doctor was heartbroken that word had gotten out. “This is your pregnancy,” she told me. “No one else’s.”

“I know,” I said, but I wasn’t sure if I believed her. I saw the way she looked at me.

Gifts showed up on my doorstep—a 12-pack of mason jars, a beautiful mahogany beehive frame, a beekeeper’s veil. Every week, I went into the clinic and listened to you. I dreamt in hivesong. My doctor talked me through the procedure. It would need to be a C-section. My hospital room would need windows that open. I imagined the nurses in mesh bonnets and thick gloves, their excited, fearful eyes looking out. I imagined my doctor with her milkweed hair, lifting a slab of honeycomb out of me. I imagined you swirling through the room, tornado-like, and ignoring the open windows, and settling like a thick, humming blanket on my chest.

“The birth plan is only a tool,” my doctor said. “As soon as it’s not helping, you throw it out. You find what works for you.” Her eyes filled with tears, and she couldn’t continue.

I tended my garden. I read about honeybees in winter—how they form a cluster underground to stay warm. I searched everywhere for the doll from my childhood, the one with the eyes that never shut, but my mother must’ve thrown it away before she died.

“You’re glowing,” one of the photographers called out, while I was down on my knees, planting marigolds.

He was right. At the grocery store, I saw her on the cover of TIME Magazine—the Bee Mom. Head bowed, cheeks flushed from sun. I wanted to be like her. Distant and beautiful, the way hope always is.

At home, I spread my mother’s old quilt in the backyard. I tasted the honey I’d gathered—liquid gold, pale and milky, floral, fruity, acidic. I let my eyes close. I felt the first of you crawling out, a vibration on the tip of my tongue.

Lindy Biller is a writer and mom based in the Midwest. Her fiction has recently appeared at Longleaf Review, Perhappened, Chestnut Review, and Flash Frog. Find her on Twitter at @lindymbiller.