Behind the Bees: Georgia Riordan on the Inspiration and Craft of "The Bumbley Jar"
This is not one of my “horror stories” in the way my other pieces like Interstate 80 (Cosmic Horror Monthly) or All the Little Pretty Ones (Pulp Asylum) are. In fact, this wasn’t meant to be a horror story at all, nor would I consider it a true horror story. The bumbley jar began with the simple image of a little girl holding a glass jar, like one she’d collect fireflies in, except it was full of bees. For a while, I threw around the idea of the bee-jar being a familiar for the little girl, but I wanted to write this piece to fulfill the parameters of a flash assignment, and inventing magic takes too much time. Unless, of course, the magic already exists.
I am terrified of bees. I’ve been stung more times by the evil wasp-variants of the world than can be an accident. I didn’t want my little girl to be afraid of bees, so I really grappled with how I could make bees “magical” without leaving the real world. During my childhood, studies were done to test the magnificent sense of smell bees had, which developed into experiments to see if bees could detect scent markers for illness, particularly cancer. There were rumors about early findings around 15 years ago, and it was these rumors adults preached to me to get me to calm down around bees (just like the grandmother did to my narrator). It’s funny—by the time this story was polished and published, MSU had a breakthrough study (2024) that confirmed the accuracy of bee-cancer-detection to be 88 percent. I felt a little prophetic, since the first draft was complete before the Michigan study, but it’s old hat now.
It was an easy jump from “bees are good because they can smell cancer” to “the bee jar can be used as cancer detection.” I really did not want my little girl to die; I was determined to steer away from the typical pain of a horror story. I wasn’t keen on killing my narrator, either, so there had to be a grandparent with cancer. Keeping my narrator alive wouldn’t just be convenient for the story—it would keep her alive, stuck in her own jar of grief.
From there, the relationships unfolded naturally, and the humor of bees in a jar in the bathroom followed. It was ridiculous to imagine. I found myself sitting in the bathroom with my automatic toothbrush on, just to see if the sound would make me laugh. (Spoiler: it did not.) However, I knew the readers would laugh—maybe not as relief, but as permission. No one wants to read a dying-grandparent story straight through without laughing somewhere, and the absurdity of bees in a bathroom let the grief in sideways. That humor gives the reader temporary freedom from the narrator’s fear, while framing the bathroom—a place of domestic comfort and bodily vulnerability—as a refuge that can only last as long as a laugh.
But back to our bees: the bees don’t sting, they don’t die, they don’t react. It’s the ritual around the jar—the breathing, the weekly attention—that creates the story’s rhythm and tension. The focus shifts from the childlike interpretation of “real life magic” to the narrator’s ritualistic survival. Her visits to the bees become her secret. She’s rehearsing the act of living unafraid while still deep in the throes of mourning and fear. The normal ritual of existing as her own self after her child has gone to sleep is eclipsed by her need for security. The endurance of the bumbley jar becomes both a necessity and a kind of magic for the mother. Ironically, as the daughter outgrows the jar, her mother discovers its endurance—and its meaning—for herself. Life goes on, the bees stay bumbling, and the ritual holds both the narrator and our ending steady.
Georgia Riordan (she/they) is an author and writing professor. Though primarily a poet, their work also explores the forms of flash, essay, and short fiction and the genres and cross-genres of horror, creative nonfiction, and speculative fiction.
