Exclusive Extract: A Beautiful Lack of Consequence by Monika Radojevic
We are delighted to publish an exclusive extract from Brazilian-Montenegrin writer Monika Radojevic's debut short story collection, A Beautiful Lack of Consequence. In this darkly comic, dystopian short story – titled 'Menace' – a world too close to our own deals with appearances and disappearances of epic proportions.
The first time it happens, no one realises what they’re witnessing. Not even later, when the vanishings dominate the headlines, do the people in the park realise they were there, front row, when it began.
It takes place outside, on the kind of summer afternoon where the heat is so extreme that bored children are cracking eggs open on sizzling car bonnets, marvelling at the hardening glisten of the yolk. In a park at the edge of the city, the mothers sit under the shade of leafy trees, hushing others around them or pressing their noses into the tiny, wriggling toes of their babies and inhaling the sweet, damp smell. There are squeezy tubes of fruit yogurt and bland snacks for the babies, and iced coffees for the mothers. The grass has lost all its moisture, becoming dusty and hard.
One of the mothers sits with her toddler and indulges his latest obsession, a book about dinosaurs. He smashes his pudgy fist into a drawing of a Diplodocus and squeals with delight when the mother growls into his neck. He’d been terrified of dinosaurs until she told him about the asteroid hitting the earth, how all the soot had blocked out the sun and barely anything had survived. Then he had been terrified of asteroids, until she lied and told him the sun had swallowed them all. And even though she’s the closest one to the situation, when it happens – which is imminently – she doesn’t notice it either. Which is a shame.
There is a muffled sort of bang, like the thud of a large sack of flour falling off a countertop. The mother is startled, she and her child jump in unison. A few other heads pop up in mild surprise, turning towards its source: a copse of trees that surround a shallow lagoon, often avoided for its stench. The little boy begins to cry, and the mother bounces him in her arms, holding him close to her and murmuring what a brave, brave boy you are. She one-handedly piles their snacks and books and toys and sunhats and water bottles and sunscreen and changing bag into the stroller then awkwardly drags it across the grass until she’s much further away from the lagoon. By the time her son calms down, they have both moved on from the strange noise.
Nothing else really happens after that, and the distant jingle of an ice cream van breaks the sudden, communal stillness. Other mothers curl back into their babies with soft coos, a group of youngsters spread themselves back out onto the grass with loud laughs. The heat is demanding, and who has the energy to go poking about in mosquito-ridden waters, anyway? Not in this weather.
And so, no one reacts and no one notices a thick cloud of what appears to be smoke rising from the copse, undulating like a black wave rising directly from the earth. They do not hear the low buzz – almost a moan? – that accompanies the mass as it scatters across the sky and quickly melts into the distance. Nothing changes. Yet.
A few days later, MISSING posters populate the park, zip-tied to lampposts and hammered into trees. Now laminated in black and white, the lined face of a woman in her sixties is sprinkled into the trees like sugar. The black and white image isn’t the best quality; it flattens her and makes her look much older than she is, with a jowly face and a thin mouth. Underneath this image the poster reads, Mother and wife, Joyce, missing since Wednesday. Last seen in this park — have you seen this woman? All information welcome, please call — and then a number. Someone had hand-written it on every single poster in red ink, with neat, rounded numbers.
The thing about Joyce though, is that she is neither young nor beautiful, and this works against her. She might have been the first to go missing, but she doesn’t stay the first for long. By autumn her image has melted away amongst the five other missing faces. People are spooked by all the posters and what this might mean for the safety of their park, with its luscious trees and poorly lit paths, especially now with the sun setting earlier and earlier. And the weeks pass, things do not change. You’d think a story like this would be everywhere — six women vanished, in the same part of the clean, shiny city. And you’d be right of course, but probably not the way you imagined.
When the image of the seventh woman goes up, the users of the park complain there’s more black and white than green. Where are the police? They mutter amongst themselves, why can’t we just enjoy our park in peace? Haven’t we earned that small pleasure?
And it is this spark that ends up setting the whole story on fire. One of the local residents does it. An older man – a bachelor by choice, he claims – calls up a local reporter and complains about how dreadfully slow the police are, how none of the women have been found, how the park-lovers have formed a support group to accompany each other on their daily walks. The reporter asks if anyone from the group has spoken to the families of those women, and the man is quite baffled by that question. Why would we speak to strangers?
The story goes viral and divides the internet. Some are disgusted by the support group’s lack of concern for the missing women, which becomes a national scandal in and of itself. Others focus on the police, because really, how incompetent can a force be to find not a single shred of evidence or a lead for seven women? What is really going on here?
At this point, the sleuths and the armchair detectives join the dots. It’s not just seven women, but hundreds, who have disappeared in the past few months, all over the country. Every day it seems there’s another name in the headlines, another family camping outside their elected officials’ offices with blown up pictures. There is twenty-four-hour news coverage, and fundraisers, and hashtags and T-shirts and vigils. Speculation buzzes with the grim determination of flies around manure.
Another strange thing begins to happen: every so often, people report bizarre swarms of bees in their neighbourhoods, erratic in the sky. They move in coordinated curls and loops, like the twist of a woman’s hair. The noise emitting from these bees is unsettling; a thrum, a wailing lament that pushes into stomachs and burrows deep into marrow.
But who knows what to do with that kind of information?
By December, the mysterious fate of the women – their numbers swelling – grips the nation. Everyone talks about the women and the bees and everyone is worried that their sister or mother or aunt or grandma or cousin or friend will be next. Or that they will be next. The women wonder if it is painful. Police forces from different states furiously try to understand how hundreds can simply disappear with no evidence, no pattern, and no link. Some have hard lives, some really don’t — some simply vanish whilst doing the washing up. Even the young, beautiful, pale ones are going now, their parents pleading for information and holding up headshots for the cameras. Grief becomes so commonplace it beds amongst the flowerbeds and garden hedges, which the bees will nuzzle in the spring. And, well, there’s something terrible about getting so used to vanishing women, but that is exactly what happens. No bodies are found. There are marches and demonstrations, but there’s also an election cycle, and that’s really quite important. The newly elected president promises unprecedented levels of funding to explain the unexplainable, once and for all… but he’s talking about the bees, of course. The bees are the real problem by now. They have started to hunt.
No one knows exactly when, or why, the declining bee population starts to reverse. It doesn’t make any sense. Scientists are at first ecstatic, heralding the dawn of a new, lush era for the planet. But the thing about the bees is that they are unpredictable, misbehaving, and altogether terrifying. This particular species appears to be aggressive and intelligent, banding together to chase people down the street for no discernible reason. A few unlucky souls who swipe at the bees with electric fly swats or other such weapons find themselves slowly and agonisingly stung to death, the bees’ spent little bodies forming mounds next to the swollen corpses they leave behind. They hover outside homes and workplaces, crawl inside ventilation shafts, and cause structural damage to the public libraries, hospitals, and offices, or swarm entire vehicles for hours at a time, leaving petrified, sweating drivers trapped inside their cars. The more women disappear, it seems, the more the bees rage.
It must be said, the bees are a menace.
We are developing solutions, the scientists say. They argue ferociously with the religious leaders, who understand exactly what is going on. It is at best a warning, the leaders say, and at worst, the end of us all.
Don’t be stupid, the new President says. They build a custom suit for him to wear now, every time he steps outside. This country remains undefeated in military history. We’ve got the biggest, strongest economy in the world. We can handle a few rogue bees.
But even he has to admit it’s taking longer than he would like. And there are costs. Across the country, without women, households are collapsing, care homes are disintegrating, and schools are effectively being run by the pupils. Men are feeding their children so much cereal for dinner it triggers a national wheat shortage. The pornography industry crumbles, wiping a cool twelve billion from the economy. The new President declares: it’s them or us. The scientists have finally figured it out, he says. There’s a vague promise in a speech somewhere to reverse the decline of civilisation, which does well for his approval ratings, and then there’s a taskforce, specially created, with the sole aim of eradicating the bees. And then of course, there is fierce opposition from those who worship the bees and the reckoning they bring — who have taken to walking around in loose, flowing black, brown, and yellow robes, their arms outstretched. If the bees land on them, it is a great honour. The worshippers frequently warn of the apocalyptic consequences attacking the bees would bring. So it is no surprise that when the President announces his next move, they swiftly take to the underground bunkers.
It begins a year to the day since that mother – who knows what became of her? – sat in that park with her little boy, reading him his dinosaur book, unwittingly a few feet away from the very epicentre of it all. She was, or is, a single mother. If something happened to her, her little boy will be in someone else’s care now.
Like every good reckoning, there is humour to be found. Engineers in beekeeper suits attach comedically huge nozzles to every building in the country which stands over 60 feet high. A nozzle for every square foot, metres and metres of slender tubes running along sidewalks like reams of freakish spaghetti. Imagine the cost of it all! People watch from their windows. Some of them, the ones with young kids, make signs to stick to the glass, saying things like, bees belong in flowers! And we love you, Mr President.
The taskforce has an endless budget, but even with all that shiny, clean money, it takes them almost half a year to rig the entire country. The bees hover near the engineers as they work, curious. Often, two or three of the more daring bees will split from the group and creep closer, landing on concrete or steel or glass or perspex and resting their wings on their backs.
Perhaps they are scouts, sent to assess the situation. Some cities report attempts by the bees to chew through the spaghetti strings, as if they can sense the danger coming. But even working together, their little jaws cannot puncture those cables, and they soon lose interest.
For weeks now, everyone has been warned that they must stay inside on this specific day. The President, who is, by now, not new and much greyer, promises them that this is it — the end of the ordeal.
And then the day comes. The army, clad in protective gear and gas masks, apprehends anyone who is brave enough to attempt breaking this rule. The country collectively holds its breath. And then, at precisely 11 am, 400 million cubic feet of custom-made pesticide is released into the air.
First, it is very quiet. It must not have worked. The President’s suit is soaked through with sweat; the scientists frantically discuss calculations and margins of error; the engineers begin to worry about nozzle malfunctions or distribution efficiency, until —
Screams. Screams. SCREAMS. Chaos rips through the air like a detonation, like a murder, like an ending. Everywhere is black and fuzzy and calcified as the bees lose their bearings and career into the windows and the pavements. They move as if on fire, as if swallowing acid, as if they’ve been reigning themselves in out of compassion up until now. Their pain is unbelievable and the hours pass, slow and sticky. Their terror is so profound it has a smell (rotting cabbage) and a sound (a child drowning, over and over again). Citizens stuff their heads under pillows and pull blankets over themselves, and when they emerge the bees are gone. The air smells like the aftermath of chemical wildfire — that is to say, like death. But there are no bodies.
Hours pass in silence, almost dreamlike. The President prepares his victory speech. He tries to forget the sound and ignore the smell. His hair, at this point, is utterly grey. Then —
Pop pop pop. The women vanish. Quicker and hungrier and angrier, they go. And then —
Softly, as the dawning sun races upwards, great plumes of what looks like smoke drift into the air. The bees start to block out the light, a sea of ash settling like a shroud across the sky. They move as one — languid, lazy at first. But those who are watching can see them pick up speed. The President’s shiny, grey face is broadcast around the world as he begins his victory speech.
What will happen when the sun cannot shine?
A low whine begins — soon it will become frenzied enough to shatter tiny, delicate earbones. How beautiful. How mesmerising. How deadly.
A Beautiful Lack of Consequence by Monika Radojevic is published by Merky Books on 20 March, 2025 in hardback.
