A few weeks ago, I asked Kit if he would like to go to King’s Park.
“No way!” he answered adamantly.
“Kit!” I chided, “Don’t be rude.”
“No way, thank you,” he amended.
“Why don’t you want to go?” I probed.
“Bees,” he said.
A few years ago, Kit, my friend Emily and I went for a walk in King’s Park. As far as Kit is concerned, his abusive mother took him there for the Sole Purpose of getting stung by a bee, and Emily was an accessory to a Bee Stinging. We all wanted to go for a walk and to see the wild flowers. So off we went, Kit travelling in the meerkat pouch in my backpack.
There are some really amazing species in WA. According to MS Word, we saw a lot of boobs, which are actually boabs, or baobabs. They are those trees that look like I do by the end of the Christmas season (somewhat overstuffed). We also saw a lot of kangaroo paws, flowers which I had never seen before. For Kit’s benefit, I pretended they were called meerkat paws. He was chuffed, even if he didn’t quite believe me.
It was a very hot day and we ended up walking much further than we meant to along a special magic path; it went uphill all the way there and uphill all the way back! When Kit asked to stop and play in the flowers, I gladly put him down at the edge of a flower bed and he went nuts climbing plants and digging little holes. Little did I know, he was also playing with bees, who apparently didn’t want to be buried alive.
The bee that stung Kit was having so much fun that it decided disembowelling itself would be preferable. Like a zom-bee, it dug itself out of its grave, and plunged its stinger into the paw of its captor. Kit screeched like a banshee and insisted that he had been bitten by a snake, despite the fact that there were no snakes to be seen. We realised what had happened, scraped out the stinger, and rushed him back to the car.
By the time we got there my shoes contained more sand than feet, and it felt as though Kit had gained about five kilograms. He was very brave, and spent the trip home propped up with his paw in the cold water in my water bottle.
Later, when he was feeling better, we had a chat about bees. He already knew that they are very important for pollinating our food supply. But it seems I had neglected to mention that they can sting you.
“You mean you took me to the park in Bee Season, and you knew that bees can sting you, and you didn’t even tell me?!” he squeaked, and stomped off to sulk.
I guess that explains his snakebite claim.