Generation A by Douglas Coupland

beneath your property, but you don’t own air rights.”
    “The moment that thing landed on Sister Garbagemouth here,” Mitch said, “it ceased being airborne and it is hence part of my property.”
    Erik said, “ Only if you own Diana’s body, too. But slavery’s currently illegal. So it’s Diana’s bee.”
    Erik’s wife looked at it closely. “I’d forgotten how small they are. To think I used to be frightened of them. And look, it’s been collecting pollen. See—its little pollen saddlebags are full.”
    It dawned on me that I should leave before Mitch’s greed got the best of him, so I beelined (yes! A pun! I know, puns aren’t funny, but I love them! Possibly connected to my Tourette’s) to my place, where I shut the kitchen door behind me and locked it, leaving Mitch, Erik and his wife gaping. I swept away some cinnamon and sugar left over from the morning’s toast, and placed the bee on top of a white sheet of paper on the kitchen table.
    We all wanted the bees to come back, but in our hearts, none of us believed we deserved them—and then here I go and kill one. My temples were thumping furiously. I felt guilty that this living thing was now dead because it chose to sting me. I knew I had to phone the authorities.
    I began to pray, then remembered that I’d not only been stung but had also just been excommunicated.
    I let my hands drop and considered the act of praying. Does praying make my body emit waves like a cellphone? Am I always emitting waves, even when I’m doing dishes? Does deliberate praying merely increase the power of those waves? What is the physical mechanism whereby prayers are “heard”?
    I wanted to pray but couldn’t bring myself to do so. Between animal violence, excommunication and being stung by the first bee in Canada for God knows how many years—and losing faith in the process of prayer—I’d had quite the half-hour. And it wasn’t over yet. While I was staring at the bee atop its white paper, Mitch started to pound on the door. “Give me back my bee, you stupid bitch!” The door was jiggling, and I doubted its ability to withstand a full-on Mitch attack, so I gathered up my bee and retreated to the basement storm cellar, locking it from the inside. This wasn’t cowardice; this was me being practical—and not wanting my specimen damaged. (In a few weeks I’d watch archived news footage of the RCMP doing a takedown of Mitch on my front lawn, smashing his face into the dandelions and sorrel, pulling his arms back with delicious amounts of force and cuffing his hands behind him. Ahh . . . excess force . Sometimes I rather like it.)
    Maybe five minutes later there was a knock on the cellar door. Much to my relief, it was the RCMP, clad in haz-mat suits. Overkill? Through the plastic they demanded, “Give us the bee. Give us the bee.” I did. It went into a small box, like one for a wedding ring. I got to the top of my basement stairs to find my house being tarped with white polypropylene sheets. Outside the front door, the whole neighbourhood was being shrouded. For the first time in my life, the future felt futuristic.
    I think I’m coming across as Miss Cool Customer here, discussing the Mitch/Kayla debacle, my bee sting and all those goons wearing haz-mat suits as if I were doing a homework assignment on the 1962 Congo Crisis. I’m such a total fucking hypocrite.
    I haven’t mentioned how, during this whole bee sting episode, a quarter of my brain was preoccupied with finding a way to stick a Henckels four-star carving knife into Erik’s wife’s pearl-clad throat to clear the way for my infatuation with him—but another quarter wanted to drag Erik down to Lake Nipissing and drown him for being a smug prick and for taking Mitch’s side against the dog, as well as for excommunicating me from my little Baptist escape inside a converted pet food store on McIntyre Street—a place that still smells, after all these years, of kibble, especially at the