Apis

Part 1

Chapter 1

It was snowing in June the day I decided to write a novel. I had just finished reading yet another thrift store paperback, and as I stared at the stacks of books cluttering my flat, I thought maybe if I could consume all of these words I could probably regurgitate them in a more or less original way as well. The trouble was I didn't know if I had the stamina to write a whole novel, as I’d struggled to write anything longer than a couple of pages at best, and even my thesis draft was described as "terse" by my graduate committee.

I knew I hadn't always had such a short attention span for stories, because as a child I delighted in writing epics in elaborate worlds I'd created, complete with maps, histories, and languages. During recess I'd run around the playground, making believe I was in one of my own worlds. This was a defense mechanism, I’m sure, because I was a foster kid; with no place to call “home” I had to make up my own. I'm sure I used up all of my imagination too early, because by the time I was old enough to graduate high school I couldn't even imagine what I would do with the next 50 or so years of my life. I struggled at university coming up with original research ideas, and preferred just to take whatever research position was open. I ended up specializing in insects after stumbling into a lead research role for a study on mountain pine beetles my sophomore year, then later got an assistantship with Dr. Allen, honey bee expert.

I eventually became more interested in the broader effects in ecology: climate change, chain reactions, the butterfly effect. I loved seeing how the entire web of ecological interactions collapsed if you altered even a single strand, like the trophic cascade: when the wolves were exterminated from Yellowstone National Park, the elk population exploded. Diseases emerged and spread like wildfire among the populations, and plant growth became stunted due to overgrazing. The reduced plant growth affected the other animals, especially birds and insects, and dying numbers of those industrious pollinators resulted in even fewer plants the next year. Beavers began to disappear, without the willow plants they rely on for food and homes. The loss of plant life also resulted in significant erosion in the soil, due to the lack of strong roots to hold everything together. When wolves were finally reintroduced in the 90s, they rapidly brought the elk population back to a manageable level, and the ecosystem was able to begin renormalizing. I also found a love for statistical modeling, and I thought that maybe if you could model the exact cause and effect reaction for every decision ever made up to now, you could find a link that you wanted to erase and change it, even if it occurred in the past.

What I lacked in imagination I absolutely did not make up for in experience. As I grew older I became increasingly less interested in adventure, or even really in leaving my own house, and I enjoyed the peace of simplicity. Despite being an exemplary student, my anxiety held me back from groveling to my professors or becoming one of their star students, the ones always picked first for new opportunities. I hadn’t completed my thesis when I began working for an environmental law firm, and when I eventually went to full time, the idea of finishing my thesis felt trivial. I hadn’t needed a graduate degree for the job, which consisted mainly of taking samples of swamp water and diesel exhaust.

I had no family, and I lived alone in a basement flat with a grey Maine coon who had managed to survive her first several years in a meth house. She escaped after an explosion in the basement, and was found by firefighters hiding under a toolshed, her silky fur singed at the tips. She had been adopted by several families before I met her, all of whom had sent her back after no more than a couple days, citing her "unfriendliness." It sounded like a perk to me, because everyone who’s ever met me would describe me as “unfriendly,” too. After I adopted her, I barely saw her for six weeks. Only the regular need to fill her food and water bowls or change her litter box told me she was still in my tiny apartment. Then one day she climbed into my pillow and curled up around my head as I fell asleep, and that was that. I named her Echo.

I decided to write a novel because I was almost 30 and I had yet to do anything meaningful with my life, but that's about as far as my muse would take me. I had no idea what to write about; no characters, no plots or settings or themes. I had grown up around a regularly revolving set of strangers and never knew anyone beyond a superficial level until college, and I certainly wasn’t ready to think about that. I stared at the blinking cursor on my screen for a few minutes before closing my laptop and setting it down.

I heard the soft hum of a honey bee buzzing; a sound I knew well after spending hot summers studying them for my thesis. I looked out towards the only window in my flat, above the kitchen sink. The glass was broken in the corner, letting in the bitter cold in the winter and the bitter stink of asphalt in the summer. It was snowing outside, despite the June, despite 90 degree weather last week, because that's what weather patterns were doing now. Everything, really, was becoming increasingly less predictable as I grew older, and I had no idea if it was me or the world that was losing touch.

In Norse mythology, bees were believed to feed from the sap that drips from Yygdrasil, the world tree, imbuing them with the power of foresight, and they were seen as both omens and agents of fate. As I watched the snow fall outside, another bee crawled under the window, then another, and soon all three sisters were flying around my ceiling, their soft buzzing filling my ears. I stood up to look closer, and saw that a large swarm was dangling off the overhang over my window. A queen in a nearby hive must have taken off, along with half her children, leaving the rest to raise a new queen. They must not have expected the snow any more than I did, because they would likely freeze overnight without a hive to keep warm.

It was getting dark, and my dream to write a novel was quickly starting to feel like an old memory, already fading and torn. I stared idly at the three bees circling lazily around my ceiling. I hated getting stung by bees, ever since my graduate advisor made me go on a last minute sampling trip with him with no preparation, and I ended up getting venom poisoning from too many stings. I didn’t have my boots, so the first hive we opened up immediately found the inch-wide strip of ankle that was covered only by a sock and attacked. The Arrernte aboriginals in Australia say that getting stung by a single ngaraang , or bee,  is an honor: you have been given an important message. Ignoring the message is a grave insult to the gods, for the ngaraang  has sacrificed its life to deliver it, and to be stung by more than one bee is the ultimate disgrace. The ngaraang  is in danger now, and whole colonies are dying, abandoning the hive without a trace and only the queen bee darribun  remains. That night I felt my disgrace as my ankle swelled up 3x its normal size and I became violently ill.

I’d found out just that morning that I was pregnant, I hadn’t even had a chance to tell my boyfriend, and that night my uterus began cramping and blood and tissue poured out from between my legs. I hadn’t wanted a baby; I couldn't even imagine being responsible for a whole new life, but I mourned it just the same. When my boyfriend called me the next day, I broke up with him. I couldn’t tell him about the miscarriage. I was ashamed for how badly I felt when I thought about what could have been, especially since soon as I saw the pink lines I was wondering if I had enough in savings for an abortion. I wasn't supposed to want children, at least not for another decade or so. I was a career scientist, and giving birth would put my life on hold. By the time the bundle of cells inside me was old enough to go to school, all of my research would be outdated. The scientific world moves on when women have babies, my advisor told me once. He was always hinting that I had no place there. He made me sick to look at after that day. Every time I saw his face I heard him telling me to man up about the bee stings and refusing to let me take a break, muttering about how women are too weak to be in the sciences.

It seemed that there were more honey bees flying around my tiny studio apartment now, the buzzing sound gradually filling my ears until I could hear nothing else. Echo glared at them from her spot on the sofa, and I wondered what to do about the window. I turned out the lights, hoping it would dissuade any new intruders, then I went into the bathroom to grab a towel. When I looked in the mirror I was a little surprised to see there were even bees crawling around my hair, and I knew if I tried to get them out they'd become tangled in the black corkscrew curls, irate as they grew increasingly more trapped.

I returned to the kitchen with a towel rolled up, intending to wedge it into the gap in the window, but even more bees were clustering around the opening: dozens now, spilling out onto the counter and sink. A couple of bees licked up the sugary remains of the cereal I had for dinner from the bowl I had not yet bothered to wash. I used to love cooking, but in my solitude it was difficult to decide what to make, and too often the decision was made only by my inaction. Above my head, they flew around the dark ceiling, and I felt their vibration and movements in my scalp as more landed in my afro.

I was quickly becoming overwhelmed, so like any rational person I decided it would be best to go to bed, and maybe in the morning it would warm up and the bees would find somewhere else to live. I made myself a cup of chamomile tea, mostly just to hold the warm mug and inhale the astringent steam. I wasn’t entirely sure how I would lay down without agitating any of the bees into stinging me, but on the whole they seemed rather calm, and they moved helpfully out of my way as I lay down on the sheets. Echo remained where she was on the couch, eyeing me warily. I closed my eyes and let the dull humming of the bees lull me to sleep.

I woke up coughing, choking, gagging on a horrendously sharp pain in the back of my throat. It was dark still, and I did not know how long I had been asleep. My throat felt as though it was closing up, and when I spat out a wet, crumpled bee I realized it must have stung me. The pain was a shock, hungrily reaching down my throat towards my lungs, squeezing all of the air out of me. It occurred to me that I was in danger, that I could very well die now. I was gasping, desperate for more oxygen, and I needed to get up and call for an ambulance. I scrambled for my cell phone, knocking the now cooled tea to the floor, and the shatter of the ceramic mug was deafening. I tried to stand up, but black clouds filled my vision, and I crumpled to the floor. It was just before I passed out that I realized the black clouds were bees, swarming around me, enveloping my body in their warm, droning horde.

I awoke again to sunlight streaming through the kitchen window. Briefly I wondered if it had all been a dream, but I was laying on the hard floor next to my bed and my shirt was soaked with cold tea. Then there were the bees, crawling up the walls, hanging off the ceiling, buzzing around my house as if it was their own hive.

My body felt oddly hollow and empty, as though I was a shed exoskeleton still clinging to a tree. My skin was dry, almost crinkling like tissue paper, and underneath I could feel my blood pulsing, trembling, shivering. I thought maybe I was dehydrated, and it was hard to swallow, my mouth coated in sticky syrup. I pushed myself to sitting, sending a cloud of bees flying. When I tried to stand, a sharp pain shot through my hand, and when I looked there was a white chunk of ceramic lodged in my palm. Great.

I made my way to the bathroom, trying to ignore the bees that followed me, clung to me, crawling in my hair, down my arms, tickling my ears with their antennae. I expected a lot of blood when I pulled the ceramic shard out of my skin, but instead it just oozed  thickly out of the wound. The blood was too viscous and gleamed, slightly translucent. As I watched, a trio of honey bees landed on my palm and began licking it up. I shook my hand to get them off, but they clung tight, and soon even more bees joined in.

I glanced at my reflection, wondering if it was just the light that made my dark skin look so ashen and grey. I felt sticky and hungover, and my skin began to itch under the gripping claws of the bees. My phone started beeping, and I realized that it was very nearly 8:00, and I was very nearly late for work. I considered calling in, but I desperately wanted to leave my home with its overabundance of bees, so instead I quickly dressed and exited my flat. I hoped that whatever stragglers remained in my hair would fly away on my walk to the train station.

I felt strangely light as I walked, as though a light breeze might sweep me away. The snow from yesterday’s storm was already nearly melted in the morning sun, and steam rose in wisps from the road. The train was delayed from the now melted snow, and when it finally arrived it was packed. I huffed in frustration as too-warm bodies pressed me into the sidewalls. It felt as though my skin might collapse if someone pushed on me too hard, and I still heard buzzing in my ears, but when I ran my fingers through my hair I felt no stowaways.

Chapter 2

I got into the office seven minutes late, and when I arrived only the paralegal Erik Stansford was there. Erik was tall, with gorgeous slate grey eyes that crinkled when he laughed, long, thick eyelashes, a perfect coif of dirty blond hair, and the confidence of a man who knew that he was beautiful. Erik’s job was mainly to translate my science into the attorney’s legalese, and translate legalese so I know what I’m supposed to be looking for when I’m sampling and writing up reports. As liaison between science and law, Erik Stansford fully believed that he held more expertise in both subjects than I ever could, and he made no effort to hide that he thought I was a waste of time. He was also a fraud, and I regularly had to double check his reports to make sure he wasn’t fudging numbers.

“Do you have the data on the Harris’ estate?” Erik asked, as soon as I walked in the door.

I dug through my bag, looking for my keys. “I’ll only need a minute.”

“Take seven, you’re already that late,” he scolded, looking up from his computer for the first time, and then his face paled, his eyes widened. “Woah.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You look,” Erik hesitated, not his usual arrogant, confident self, “Er, never mind. Get me those reports, I asked for them weeks ago.” It took weeks for the samples to be processed, and I had only received the results yesterday. I wouldn't show him the raw data; I couldn't trust him not to manipulate it. I opened my mouth to retort, but my tongue suddenly felt too sticky, too sweet, and a buzzing filled my ears again. A single bee flew across the room, its humming wings loud in the quiet office. We watched it, a growing confusion evident on Erik’s face.

“Let me get you those reports,” I said, turning into my room, and another bee darted by, close enough that I could feel the air currents from its wings.

My lab was not large, just an office equipped for rudimentary analysis, and all samples had to be independently verified by outside labs anyway. Most of my time was spent in the field, collecting samples to send to the local university’s analytical labs. The rest was spent interpreting the results and presenting them in a neat, easy to understand format, preferably with lots of graphs, so that Williams and Jonas, attorneys at law could sue contractors and builders and manufacturers for violating environmental protection laws, even as they were constantly being whittled down and modified, and would likely disappear entirely before long.

I thought I could feel the fluorescent hum of the lights, like maybe the electromagnetic waves were resonating within my skull, and soon my entire skeleton would collapse. I flipped off the switch, but the darkness felt wrong, too. My lab didn’t have a window, and I suddenly missed the sun desperately.

“Astrid, come out here!” Erik was yelling. I left my lab and saw him dancing around his office, his arms flailing as a dozen bees circled around him. “Did someone leave a window open?” He swatted at another bee.

“Don’t do that,” I recommended as I walked into the kitchenette to check the windows. “If you fight black, they’ll think you’re a threat.”

Erik yelped and shook his hand out. It already looked like it was swelling. “What, now you’re the expert on bees?”

“Well, yes, actually," I retorted, which he already knew. Erik's nickname for me was Bee Girl, but he only used it when he wanted to insult me. I circled the office and confirmed all of the windows were closed and locked.

At that moment, Matthew Jonas walked through the front door. Tall, with olive skin and wavy dark hair, Matt was the environmentalist of the Williams & Jonas duo. He got through law school by the skin of his teeth, often ditching lectures to attend protests and rallies. His partner and husband, Samuel Williams, was short, balding, and a stereotypical lawyer: possibly a mild psychopath, and definitely more concerned with making a good argument than being right, but he deferred to Matt’s moral compass and was responsible for a lot of policy changes in the environment’s favor. Together they made an excellent legal team, and an even more lovely family, as they had adopted a baby boy named Joey several years ago. I spent a number of summer evenings with them, sitting on their porch, drinking cold cider and watching Joey race around their backyard, catching fireflies. In the summers they would even invite me to their lakehouse, and I would float lazily in the water, warm in the sun until Joey splashed around me. They had a key to my flat for if I ever needed them to take care of Echo, and they were my emergency contacts for if I ever ended up in a hospital somewhere. I thought they were probably the closest thing I had to a family. I thought maybe if they had been my parents instead of the half-dozen or more foster homes I grew up in, things would be different.

“What is this?” Matt was wide-eyed, watching the bees attack Erik with mild bemusement. “Did someone leave the windows open?” There were more than a hundred bees now, although several lay dead on the floor after bravely sacrificing themselves to defend against Erik’s swatting.

“I’m not sure where they came from,” I blurted, “All of the windows are closed.”

Matt glanced at my face, and his subtly changed, skin paler, eyes wider; just like Erik’s had when I got here. “Are you okay?”

Erik scoffed. “Is she okay? We’re lucky I’m not allergic to these bastards.” He swatted at another bee, then yowled. “I can’t take this anymore.”

“Sometimes bees will make a home between the walls in a building,” I offered. “Maybe there’s a hole in the drywall somewhere, and they went in instead of out.”

Matt looked around, confused. “Perhaps,” he said. “I’d better call Sam, we’re going to have to call an exterminator… Well… We can’t work here, that’s for sure. No offense, Astrid, but you look like you could use a break anyway.”

A trail of bees followed behind me as I gathered my things and left the building. It was a relief to step outside and into the sunshine. The air was warm and smelled like the sweetest of flowers. I started towards the train station, but the idea of closing myself up with a bunch of sweaty bodies made my skin crawl. Actually, my skin was crawling, like the bees were still covering me, but there were none I could see.

I decided to walk home, as it was not too far, and the day was warm and sunny, and moving around made my skin itch less. I remembered once when I was a kid, it was my second foster home so I was maybe four years old, and I was left under the tutelage of the older children most days. A boy, a 10 year old named Daquan, had made me stand barefoot on an ant hill under the deck of the house. I remembered watching the ants crawling all over me, almost weightless. I could not feel them unless I was watching them, so I knew where to concentrate on sensing the tiny prickle of their too many legs. Daquan was waiting for them to bite me, and when it came clear they wouldn't he pulled my pants down and shoved me hard into the gravel before running away. It was like that now, my skin tingling almost imperceptibly, and only by focusing very hard on the sensations could I feel them.

Chapter 3

About halfway between the office of Williams & Jonas and my basement apartment there was a park. I could smell it as I approached, a spring breeze carrying the vivid fragrance of flowers in bloom. I found myself inexorably drawn to the gardens, a splashing fountain surrounded by beds of impossibly exotic flowers soaking in the sunshine. I was glad they had survived the snowstorm yesterday, their scent still so intoxicating and addictive. I sat on a bench near the fountain, then sank to the ground, inching closer to the flowers, and before long I found myself laying in the still damp dirt between rose and lavender bushes, hopefully hidden from any casual passersby. The sun warmed my dark skin, and the perfumed air made me drowsy. My flesh stopped crawling, and I felt so incredibly peaceful, like I was going to phase out of existence; like time had simultaneously frozen and was passing by at an incredible speed.

As the shadows grew longer, the sun dipping closer to the horizon, I noticed the honey bees had once again found me. They were bouncing greedily from one flower to another, sipping up nectar and collecting pollen into little balls on their hind legs. They gathered on my body, clustering on patches of bare skin to share my heat. I became aware of a fluttering sensation in my chest, as though one of the bees had managed to crawl into my body and was creeping around my organs, buzzing her wings. I wondered if I was hungry; I had skipped breakfast and lunch after all, but my stomach felt shrivelled, like any solid food might crush something vital within me. I felt desperately thirsty, however, as I had spent an entire afternoon in the sun, and I decided to stop at a bar on my way home.

By the time I had reached the bar, the sun was beginning to sink down the horizon, and the bees had once again disappeared. The dimly lit bar was empty, just myself and the bartender and the ever present droning in my ears. My mouth was dry, so I ordered a lemon seltzer water as I sat down on a sticky barstool. Behind me the door opened again, and I gulped down the water and signalled for another before the newcomer had even made his way to the bar.

“Can I buy you a drink?” I turned to face the source of the question: a greasy white man with wet-looking blond hair, who was climbing into the barstool next to me. “Perhaps something to go with that dark chocolate I’ll be tasting later,” he added lecherously.

“No,” I said firmly, looking him straight in the eyes. His face blanched, just like Erik’s and Matt’s had that morning. I wondered what scared them. Could they see the emptiness in me; that hollow, dried out feeling? Or could they hear the buzzing that seemed to start somewhere in my chest, vibrating up through my throat and into my head like a thousand bees clustering together. Bees do that when they are cold: cluster together in a large ball, surrounding their queen and her larvae, then vibrate their wings to generate enough heat to survive even the harshest of winter nights. My head ached under the vibrations.

To the bartender, I asked, “Can I get something sweet? Lots and lots of fruit.” The man next to me sneered something about girly drinks, and ordered a whiskey for himself. The bartender set a frosty glass of something salmon pink in front of me. It smelled like a kid’s lip balm, fruity and saccharine and artificial. I took a sip, and the sweetness and the alcohol made my throat buzz. I set the glass down, and watched as one bee, then another landed on the rim and began to drink. Bees in the wild will occasionally get drunk on rotting fruit, and when they’ve had their fill they will weave through the air, crashing into their comrades, and are often denied entry to the hive until they have sobered up.

The man next to me managed to cram himself even closer, his right leg pressed against my left. He reached a hand out towards my thigh, then immediately pulled away, shouting, “Son of a bitch!” A dead bee fell to the floor, her stinger still stuck in the skin on the back of his hand, the venom sac still pumping. “What the fuck lady?” he snarled at me. More bees had gathered on the bartop, and the air smelled faintly of bananas. The man stood, looming over me as though he knew, somehow he knew, that I was responsible for his getting stung. “You’ve got a pest problem here,” he shouted at the bartender, before huffing away and slamming the door to the bar.

The bees disappeared as I finished my drink. I dropped an extra twenty in the spot next to mine, as I didn’t think the man had bothered to pay for his whiskey, then left the bar to go home. I had just crossed the street when I was grabbed from behind by a dark figure I’d missed in the alley. The figure held a knife to my throat; I could feel the point just barely grazing my skin. My body felt hot, itchy, antsy. “Better not have any fucking bees with you now,” he growled, and I recognized the voice as the man’s from the bar.

He dragged me backwards, deeper into the shadows, and I could feel the bulge of his dick pressed into my thigh as he held me. I struggled out of his arms, but I was off balance and he shoved me, the back of my head exploding in pain as it hit the brick wall. I tried to stand up but the man was advancing towards me, the knife still in his hand. Then a dark cloud descended from somewhere above and he began to scream again.

In Greek mythology, a priestess of Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, was kidnapped and tortured by her neighbors, who demanded she reveal the secrets to her initiation as priestess. The priestess, Melissa, refused, and in their anger they killed her and tore her body into pieces. As revenge, Demeter sent a plague upon them, and a swarm of bees emerged from the priestess’s body and attacked her killers. The bees then became the carriers of souls, and the priestess was charged with drawing them down to Earth to be reborn.

I got to my feet, watching as the man swung his arms around, trying unsuccessfully to fight off the attackers. I knew I should run, but I hesitated just a second too long, and suddenly the man broke through the cloud of bees and was coming straight at me, and then he was on me, pushing me into the dumpster, and the handle of his knife was sticking into side, just below my ribcage. I wasn’t sure it wasn’t an illusion, because although I could clearly see the knife stuck in me, I could not feel it.

Then the man finally collapsed to his knees, eyes bulging, his mouth silently opening and closing like a fish on land. Veins popped out in his neck and I realized he couldn’t breathe; it was anaphylaxis. He fell forward, face first on the gritty sidewalk, and the bees that had been crowding on every piece of exposed flesh took flight. I watched them in their murmurations, still afraid to move, still not believing, still as a statue because what the fuck was that? My fingers went down to my side, felt for the knife handle, then pulled it out. Sticky blood, orange under the sodium street lamp, coated the blade and oozed out of the wound, but not nearly as much as there should have been.

And then the bees were encompassing my wound, drinking up my blood, or whatever it was that was oozing out of me, and more still were gently buzzing around my head. I felt that I should go, because how would I explain this to the police? The bees were guiding me home, the air from their rapidly buzzing wings gently pushing me along the sidewalk, down the stairs, through my door, to my bed. I collapsed on the mattress, and the bees blanketed my body, and I thought maybe I was dying, or that I had already died, and then all was dark.

Chapter 4

I was a foster kid. My parents died in a fire when I was not yet two years old and I was saved. Of course! I was saved by the bees, awoken by their frantic humming at my window, the smell of smoke just starting to choke the air in my room as the fire spread into the hallway. I pressed my tiny toddler hands against the storm window and it popped right out, and the bees carried me down to safety, and I sat in the wet grass and listened to my parents die and my home get destroyed. That is how I remember it, but then again, I was only barely a toddler at the time.

I woke up to Echo’s rough tongue, licking my skin, checking for life. It was a dream. Of course it was a dream, except when I opened my eyes, there they were: crawling around on my walls, my books, my body. My mouth was coated in honey, so sweet and vivifying. I stood; or the bees carried me; or I floated into the bathroom. For a second my reflection was a stranger, a mummy with clouded, dead eyes stared at me; my paper-thin skin seemed dried out and torn, held together by wax. Then I blinked and it was back to normal, except for the bee crawling on my cheek under one of my eyes.

I lifted my shirt to see the wound where I'd been stabbed. It had been sealed up with white wax and a gooey brown propolis made from tree sap. A small amount of blood oozed out, and I touched it with my fingertips. It was sticky like honey, and when I brought it to my lips it was sweet. The cut on my hand from yesterday had vanished except for a thin white line in my skin.

My cell phone dinged, a text message from Matt. “No sign of bees today, exterminator is flummoxed! He wants to fog the building just in case. Take the day off, have a nice long weekend :)” I would not have gone in anyway. I did not want to go to work. I wanted to walk back to the park I lay in yesterday and nourish myself with the sun and smell and nectar of plants. Or further, away from the city, to the woods or a wildflower-filled valley. My job, my office, even Matt and Sam and Joey, who was 7 now, were not significant. I wanted to be significant. I wanted to be as beautiful as a prairie meadow, as vital as a desert oasis. Not a novel, but a story, a legend. I felt as though this was my destiny, but how much of it was my choice, and how much was the bees', I had no idea.

I put on clothes, the barest minimum of covering: soft fabricked harem pants, a loose cotton shirt. Just enough to get me through a civilized society. I did not want to wear shoes; I wanted to feel the Earth vibrate under my feet.

I looked through my small apartment for anything I wanted to keep. I had accumulated little of importance in the four years since I had moved in here, mostly just books. I was 25 when I moved in, and spring semester was ending soon. Sam and Matt had called me into their office a week previously and offered a full time position, with a raise that would let me move out of the dorms and into my own apartment. I had only been working with them for a few weeks, but Matt said they admired my work ethic, and wanted to give me a trial run for the summer. I think they just needed someone to keep Erik in check.

I wasn't sure by then if I was going to finish my degree. I had recently broken up with my boyfriend, my own heart shattering even as I pushed him away. His name was Kevin, and he was white; albino, actually, his skin so pure and translucent you could see his blood vessels pulsing. I was in love with his purple eyes and white eyelashes, even as they hid behind thick, dark bifocals; he was myopic, effectively blind, and his eyes too sensitive to anything brighter than a single flame. He used candles in his room, and I hated it, because I was terrified of fire, of course. Kevin had a guide dog named Bruce, a golden retriever with a perpetual look of confusion, but behind the furry mask he was secretly a genius who always knew what Kevin needed before Kevin did.

What a cliche, my blackness and his whiteness, and both of us orphans. Kevin was younger than me, and he lived with his parents who had adopted him when he was 7. I lived in campus dorms on scholarships, but I'd earned them. I had graduated from high school effectively homeless, but valedictorian. I lived in my science teacher’s girlfriend's apartment my last couple months of high school, after he noticed I was staying late and showering in the gym locker rooms. It was all totally kosher, but always there were whispers and judgements.

My last foster family kicked me out when I turned 17, even though I would not age out of the system until I finished school at least. I’m sure they still collected the welfare checks that came every month. Mr. Pulaski, my physics teacher, asked to see me after school one day, where he told me my future looked so bright and promising. He invited me to dinner, brought me to his girlfriend’s apartment. She was ready with the best cooked meal I have ever had in my life, at least as far as I could remember. My parents were doctors and I’m sure they fed me the healthiest finger foods: grapes cut in quarters so I would not choke, little chunks of grilled chicken seasoned with olive oil for its healthy fats, boiled vegetables that I could chew through with just my gums. I had such a broad pallet as a kid, even though my foster parents rarely stocked their pantries with much more than Kraft macaroni and cheese and ramen. If I was lucky I’d get a family with a sweet tooth, because ever since the bees saved my life I could not get enough of sugar. Fruits were best, but I also savored candy and sugary soda. I once drank an entire bottle of honey, even though I knew it would mean getting beaten later. My foster dad then was an angry drunk and used a belt, but he was also fat, and lazy, and could not make it hurt that bad.

I learned how to cook so I could make my own, healthier meals. I did chores, if the foster parents were generous, or odd jobs if they weren’t, and used my earnings at the farmer’s market. I had to jealously guard my groceries, and I couldn’t dare put the produce in the fosters’ refrigerators. Of course, if they found my hiding places, I’d be blamed for pests, but those had been there since long before I arrived.

Mr. Pulaski’s girlfriend, Annette, cooked me salmon and wild rice, with cranberry sauce and roasted potatoes and steamed baby broccoli; “broccolini,” she called them. We sat down to eat and they told me she was going to move in with Mr. Pulaski; she was practically living with him anyway, and she needed me to stay in her apartment until the lease was up, make sure no one broke into it and the plants were watered. I knew it was going to happen, Mr. Pulaski had made sure I had my foster kid's black garbage bag when he picked me up, and I was so very touched by their kindness. During my graduation speech I thanked Mr. Pulaski and Annette, now his fiancee, and then I thanked the bees who saved my life when I was a toddler. I saw the nervous darting of eyes in the audience as I told the tall tale as though it was true, but that same story earned me my full ride scholarship at the state university.

I picked up the knife that I had pulled out of myself last night, still sticky with my blood, or honey, or whatever it was, and tucked it into my waistband. On my finger I slipped a silver ring with a tiny silver bee on it, and a single purple amethyst the same color as Kevin's eyes. It was a gift from him on our second anniversary. I had just been accepted into a research fellowship studying Apis mellifera, the  European honey bee. When I broke up with him a few years later, he insisted I keep the ring. “You deserve it,” he said, voice thin, “You have done so much good for them.” I didn’t want to tell him that I was afraid of bees now, that getting stung by them made the emptiness ache for the life I lost like an old wound.

I never defended my thesis. I couldn’t bring myself to take any more samples, and the project had been too ambitious in the first place. I knew it was doomed to failure, and the decision to drop out was made for me when my funding was pulled last minute. I didn’t bother to try to get more, because I already had a job with Williams & Jonas. I did attend Kevin’s dissertation defense a year later, although he did not know I was there. By then he must’ve known I had failed, and I knew I could not talk to him. I knew if I did I would have had to confess that I had lied, and that I probably even still loved him.

I followed Kevin’s work because his goals were the same as mine, our passion for conservation and restoration of wild habitats what brought us together in the first place. His dissertation was about changing environmental policy to promote terraforming deforested land, and he spoke so passionately about the need for foraging land for native pollinators I cried. This had always been a friendly debate between us, the native and the honey bees, especially because Kevin hated honey bees. They are an invasive species in the United States, and yet they consistently end up in the spotlight, while the 16,000 other species of bees and their needs are ignored. “Honey bees are just livestock,” Kevin would tell me; joking, of course, because we both knew he was right, and yet we both knew it didn’t matter, either, because what benefited the honey bees generally benefited the native bees as well, and what does invasive mean, anyway? The European honey bee was introduced to the new world from Europe, but it had originally evolved in southeast Asia, where the rest of the Apis  genre remain. Humans had probably evolved somewhere in Africa, and yet here we are, on every single continent, setting our sites on the Moon and beyond. We've dragged all sorts of invasive creatures along with us, even sending chimps, dogs, mice, spiders, tardigrades, and more into space, and we are always the source of these so-called invasions. We have exterminated entire species just by introducing a new predator, parasites, pests, or new diseases, which we have even used to exterminate ourselves. How many generations before the survivors adapt? At what point are the invaders so entangled in the web of life that they become a part of it? Invasions in nature happen in such a large timeline; millennia of quiet explorations, disseminations, adaptations. Competition. The land can eventually adapt to the changes; or else change entirely, the new biome unrecognizable. By that point the continental plates will have shifted, the land masses shrinking and growing, oceans rising and falling. The climate will have changed, perhaps the skies will redden from so much carbon. The sun will age, cycling through predictable nuclear exhaustion, collapse. The elements that make our planet, our cells, the molecules responsible for keeping up the seemingly endless cycles of metabolism, growth, reproduction; they were all made by a collapsing, dying star.

I met Kevin when he was a freshman and I was a junior. He was applying for a work-study position and would be working closely with me if he got it, so I was asked to attend his interview. He introduced us to the guide dog, Bruce, before himself, and he looked so small standing there as he told us about his high school environmental sciences class, his senior project monitoring the effects of hormones in wastewater on local fish populations. After Kevin was hired, Dr. Evans, department chair, a fat man in his 40’s, muttered to me, “Another diversity hire like you, Astrid. Maybe you’ll be friends.” Dr. Evans was always implying I had not deserved my scholarship, and made no effort to hide his disdain. When I started working with bees in graduate school, I dreamed of spraying isoamyl acetate into his office and accidentally dropping a sample container full of bees. Isoamyl acetate, with its strong, banana-y scent, is the primary component in the bee’s attack pheromone, and if you manage to piss off a hive you can smell it in the air.

Kevin joined my undergraduate research project in mapping forests for their susceptibility to pine beetle infestation. We would hike together for hours to reach sampling sites, each carrying heavy equipment, and even Bruce had a backpack. Kevin moved gracefully through the forest despite his eyesight, and he never complained, even though he must be sweltering, because his entire snow-white body had to be covered from the sun. I wanted to hate Kevin, for nothing more than his being lumped into the same category as me, but it was impossible. He was too kind and too passionate to be hated.

One day early in the semester I was staying late in the lab to finish up a project, and Dr. Evans found me there. He started questioning me, accusing me of stealing lab equipment, then of cheating and plagiarizing. As he spoke, he crept closer to me, making the already small lab space claustrophobic. I could smell beef jerky and alcohol on his breath as he whispered in my ear, telling me he wouldn't tell anyone if I did him a favor.

Before I could even process what that meant, Dr. Evans had his mouth pressed against mine, slimy and revolting, muffling my protests. His hands reached under my shirt then pulled at the waistband on my pants, and I tried pushing him off me but he was too heavy. I jammed my knee into his groin and he pulled away, gasping and off-balance, and then I shoved him again. He fell hard, harder than I anticipated, and his head crashed against a lab cart on the way down. I heard barking and Kevin was standing in the doorway, and I was crouched on the floor, clutching my stomach and sobbing, Dr. Evans's limp body sprawled out on the lab floor. Kevin held me in his arms as we waited for emergency services and told the campus police he'd walked in on the professor assaulting me. He claimed he'd startled Dr. Evans, and he had tripped. The professor survived with just a concussion, but he did not return to the university.

Kevin and I had our first kiss at sunset at a sampling site under the Milky Way. He couldn't see the fireflies or the stars, so I described how the dancing lightning bugs blended with the stars as one, and it felt like if you reached out and grabbed a firefly, you would actually catch a star, and that’s when he leaned in and kissed me. We were freezing, because I refused to have a campfire, and that night a furious thunderstorm blew in. Bruce burst into my tent, whimpering, golden fur dripping, and then I heard Kevin tapping shyly on the canvas. We lay parallel together, not touching, watching the tent walls get buffeted by wind and hail. Bruce snored between us, smelling like wet dog and pine sap.

Chapter 5

Echo padded around at my feet as we left my apartment, rubbing her face on my bare ankles. She seemed to have accepted the infestation, the bees humming inside me, and I, too, began to feel that it was comforting rather than painful. The sun made the bees happy, and it made me happy, and I walked aimlessly in the direction of the mountains. I felt neutrally buoyant, like if I just jumped high enough I would float, and then I would be at the mercy of the wind. Bees hummed alongside me, and I loved their droning. I ignored everything else around me as I walked, and I thought about very little beyond the deliciousness of the sun and the air and the trees. The bees told me where to go, driven by sunlight, or wind patterns, or magnetic fields, and as trees began to replace buildings the buzzing in my chest grew louder, and it felt as though my heart might burst in excitement.

We walked through the city, an odd sight no doubt: me, barefoot, trailed by a 15 pound ball of hair and claws and a murmurating cloud of bees. The skyscrapers shrank down into suburban houses, and gradually the houses thinned out and open spaces swelled with life. At random I buried my attacker’s knife, coated in my own sticky, honeyed blood, in an empty field on the side of the road. I was not worried about someone finding it, because I realized wherever the bees were taking me, I would probably not be coming back.

When there were no sidewalks left, I walked along the highway. The asphalt was hot and rough under my bare feet, but I felt lifted, like nothing on Earth could really touch me. Cars sped past in a shock of heat and exhaust fumes. I hated cars. I had learned to drive from my final foster family, the Murphys, the ones who kicked me out instead of sending me back into the system. The mother, Joanne, was a stout, middle-aged woman with nicotine stains on her teeth and fingernails who was regularly cheating on her husband, Steve, while he was deployed somewhere in the middle east. They had a son, Sean, who was only a couple years older than me and illegally taught me how to drive his car, some old piece of junk with deep bucket seats. After I passed my license exam, Sean let me drive through the mountains to celebrate, then asked me to park at a trailhead, and when I turned off the ignition the silence was deafening.

After a while of sitting in silence, Sean suddenly asked me if I was a virgin, and I replied plainly that I was not. He asked me if I could keep a secret, and I told him I would. Time seemed to stretch in front of us before he finally confessed, his voiced tinted with disgust as he spat out, "I'm gay." He told me about his best friend, Zach, who had kissed him last week, and even though Sean had pushed Zach away, he couldn't stop thinking about it. He said his mom would never accept it, his dad might even kill him. I gently touched his hand, clammy and nervous, and told him that his secret was safe with me. Then I drove us home, winding through the mountains in a pensive silence.

Zach began staying overnight at the Murphy's house every weekend, and nearly every night during breaks, ostensibly for homework and video games. Then one day Steve Murphy, on break from deployment, crashed into my room and threw something at me that landed on my physics textbook with a wet slap. It was a used condom, and I had no idea if it was Sean’s or his mom’s. Steve grabbed me by my hair and dragged me out of my room, screaming about how I was a slut, a whore, spoiling their house's purity with my sex, and I knew Sean could hear as his dad beat me. Steve tossed me out of their house, and shortly thereafter I saw Joanne's fat, liver spotted arm emerge, dropping the black trash bag with all of my things onto their deck.

I slept in a park near my high school. It was the suburbs, not too unsafe a neighborhood, but I woke up damp and shivering in the morning dew. I dragged my trash bag through the halls of my school, avoiding the stares of the few early morning club members and gym rats. I shoved the bag in my locker, then retreated to the basements to take as warm a shower as the school’s pathetic water heaters could allow. This was my life for months: arriving at school the minute the doors were unlocked, and finding as many excuses as possible to stay late. Sleeping outside, with only an occasional break to crash on a friend’s couch, or a homeless shelter, until Mr. Pulaski asked to see me after school one day and offered me a place to live.

Echo and the bees and I followed the highway and its stink of cars, of metal and rust and smoke and gasoline, until we passed a sign for the national forest. I found a place to scramble into the thickly wooded forest, and just a single layer of trees made it feel as though the old world had disappeared. The dark earth cooled my feet, and I decided to rest at the base of a pine tree while the bees hurried around me, busily collecting nectar and pollen. Echo chased a squirrel up a tree, and shortly afterward I heard the crunch of tooth on bone, and the sheer violence of the sound was a relief; a reminder of the nasty, brutish, nature of life that anchored me to reality. This was my home. This was where I belonged.

I ran away from a foster home when I was 9. It was the Jacksons, and on my third night there Mr. Jackson climbed into the bed I had to share with another foster girl, and pressed his body up against mine. He told me that if I told anyone what he was going to do, he would lock me in the basement with rats. I squeezed my eyes shut and made myself a statue, and when Mr. Jackson finished he growled in my ear, “You’re not a virgin anymore, do you know what that means? It means you’re a whore. It means no one will ever be able to love you again.” Then Mr. Jackson left, and I felt blood trickle out between my legs, and the girl whose bed I was sharing reached over and squeezed my hand, whispering, “I’m sorry.”

I ran away the next day, packing my garbage bag with a tarp and a blanket I’d stolen from the family. I raided their pantry for a jar of peanut butter, some graham crackers, and some raisins, then took off into the woods behind their house. The forest felt huge, although in the middle of the city it could not have been more than a few hundred acres, and I walked all day to find a place to set up a camp with my tarp. I lived there for six days before a park ranger found me, and my social worker picked me up, and I sat silently in her car as she told me the Jacksons were so disappointed that I’d stolen from them, and I was lucky they were not pressing charges, and I thought about what Mr. Jackson had stolen from me.

Kevin was a virgin when we met, and when he asked me, I said I was, too. We slept together for the first time after a date at the zoo. Bruce had pranced around the place, quivering with excitement for the new smells, but too well-trained to abandon his duties. When we stopped in front of the giraffe exhibit, Kevin exclaimed in delight, and I realized he was too nearsighted to see any of the smaller animals we’d already passed by. I asked him if he wanted to leave, feeling dumb for suggesting the date, but he smiled and said he was watching me, not the animals. Afterwards he walked me to my dormitory, and I held on to his hand when he turned to leave, and he followed me to my room, my roommate thankfully gone. Afterwards we lay there on my tiny bed, cicadas screaming through the open window, and I gazed at his impossibly pale skin glowing in the moonlight. He was so gentle, and so beautiful, and I was so deeply in love with him it hurt.

Kevin’s adoptive parents, Sara and Heather, were impossibly kind too, and I envied their casual and generous love. His dad had died just after he was born in a DUI, and after his mom died of cancer when he was seven he was adopted almost immediately. Sara and Heather had welcomed me into their family, and when I broke up with Kevin, I felt their loss as well.

Night fell as I lay among the roots of my tree, and Echo curled up next to me, purring as loud as the bees were buzzing. They had returned to me, a warm, vibrating blanket, and when I looked at the stars I imagined that they were bees, too. I didn’t sleep that night, just fell into a peaceful trance, watching the sky rotate above me, listening to the nocturnal insects singing for a mate. I felt vibrations in the earth as worms and ants and moles dug through the soil, expanding their tunnels or looking for food. An owl flew overhead, a silent shadow, then disappeared into the thick trees.

The next morning I walked until I found a creek with cool, clear bubbling water, and I drank from it deeply, savoring its sweetness. I felt no hunger, just an impossible, ever-present thirst. Echo followed me as I picked my way barefoot through the woods, guided by the bees, or the trees, or the flowers, and I loved her for it. I stopped when we came across blackberries, and I picked them and popped them one by one into my mouth, crushing them with my tongue and letting the sweet juice run down my throat. The bees were working tirelessly to collect nectar from the last remaining flowers. A thorn pricked my finger, letting out a single drop of honeyed blood.

We passed the days this way, me walking wherever the bees pushed me, Echo dutifully following us, disappearing occasionally and returning with feathers stuck to her mouth. We rested when the bees tired, although I did not tire; the golden energy from their honey was more than enough to sustain me, and I felt no pain, even as I tread barefoot over sharp sticks and rocks and burrs. Any injuries I sustained were quickly treated by a bee, excreting wax from her abdomen and working it with her mandibles, making it soft and malleable, then packing it into my flesh.

On the seventh day we reached a break in the trees, and came into a green valley, filled with the intoxicating scent of wildflowers in full bloom. The bees vanished briefly, then reappeared high above the grass, flying in wide circles, forming a halo over the meadow. Echo pounced into the grass and several birds took off, chirping, scolding. I sat in the middle of the field, the grass soft beneath me and watched the swarm circle around me. Occasionally, small clumps would break off and fly away, scouting the land for forage. As the sky began to dim, the swarm condensed into a single mass and descended to where I lay in the grass.

We were home.

Chapter 6

I made a little shack in the meadow, more for Echo than for me, with branches I dragged in from the forest. I spent my summer in the meadow as a bowerbird, collecting shiny rocks and trinkets to decorate my new home. My treasures: broken bits of glass from careless backcountry hikers, gleaming feathers dropped from the sky, discarded bones, flowers and herbs dried and crumbling. They hung from the ceiling, dangling from the branches, sparkling in the sunlight. I covered the dirt with soft grasses I wove into a mat. The meadow smelled so lovely, especially in the morning, especially after a rain. Bees flew clumsily around my shack and the meadow, an endless stream of departures and arrivals as they foraged for enough nectar and pollen to survive the winter.

I felt that somewhere inside me a fat queen was tirelessly laying eggs, producing an endless supply of workers. I imagined she lived somewhere near my heart, and when I rested my hand on my breast I could feel her hum. The vast amount of empty time that stretched in front of me was overwhelming, and having nothing to do, not even to take care of myself, because the bees did that, I found other ways to amuse myself. I’d grown up being ignored by one family or another, and I was resilient, and I thrived in solitude.

My first foster family had loved me, I liked to believe. They had been trying for a baby for over a decade, with no success, and the mother was told she would never be able to carry a pregnancy to term. They read a news article about a baby whose house burned down, who had somehow survived unscathed, even as her parents died, and they cried, made phone calls, pulled strings, and then I was living with them. They cried when they met me, and in the first picture of us taken together, the woman’s eyes are glistening with tears.

They were going to adopt me, they promised, but they never did, and on my third birthday the mother announced her miracle: she was pregnant. My third birthday party is the last picture they took of me, my hair braided back with little pink bows, caked-smeared smile wide on my face. Then the photos were replaced by blurry black and white ultrasounds, and the mother’s love replaced by exhausted scolding. “Why does she demand so much from me?” she lamented to the father one night, her big belly sticking out under a faded shirt. She hadn’t fed me lunch that day, said she was too tired, and when I climbed onto the counter to get an apple I accidentally knocked over a glass, which shattered all over the floor, and when I tried to clean it up I cut my foot. The mother had had to get out of bed, ankles swollen, hips so sore, breasts so tender, so tired, to clean the glass up.

The baby was born on Halloween, a beautiful little boy with perfect blue eyes and tiny pink lips, and they named him Beckett. I loved him immediately, even as he cried all night long. The mother cried too, and one night, two weeks after they came home from the hospital, I watched blearily from the doorway as she laid the still screaming newborn into his crib and left him there. I climbed into his crib and curled around him, singing and humming and stroking the bridge of his nose with my tiny fingers, and eventually we both fell asleep, Beckett’s sobs still hiccuping out of him as he slept for the first time since leaving the warm darkness of his mother’s womb.

I awoke to the mother screaming, and Beckett was screaming, and I was screaming, and the mother grabbed me out of the crib and threw me at the ground. The father came in, and the mother screamed at him, too, about how I was trying to kill the baby, and then I was alone in Beckett’s room, and then the social worker came and took me away. I hoped that without me to distract her, Beckett’s mother would be able to love him as fully as I did, but I never saw him again. I cried endlessly for Beckett and his mother after my social worker dropped me into the new home. It was a small home that was packed so tightly you could not walk a straight line without jumping over something or someone. I lived with half a dozen foster kids at any given time, plus the couple’s three biological children, and I was never alone there, but I was always ignored, and I was always lonely.

Echo disappeared from the meadow most days, returning to the shack in the twilight when the fireflies came out for their dances around the field. She grew sleek and muscular, her bulky fur thinning in the summer heat, and she was exquisite. She tolerated the bees, barely, and curled up with me at night when they were still.

I noted the passage of time only passively, the days and nights blurring together, the shadows growing longer after the sun peaked on the solstice. Leaves darkened on the trees as the air grew hotter and drier, and the sky exploded into violent lightning storms nearly every evening. The bees hated the lightning, and buzzed around my shack nervously, bumping into each other, the trinkets, me, and the tension in their hive mind felt electric. I loved the storms, and I’d lay awake and watch the flashes in the night sky through the gaps in the branches and feel the ground beneath me tremble as the thunder rolled.

The foraging range for honey bees is about two miles, and I rarely explored further than that, not wanting to be seen by a backpacker or forest ranger, and my world shrank until it was just the meadow and the trees that guarded it, just me and the bees and Echo. I grew lazy, preferring to warm myself in the sun than explore, and I thought about my foster families, and school and work, and Matt and Sam and Joey, and Kevin and Sara and Heather, and I felt nothing for them. It was the same emptiness that I felt when I first woke up to the bees, my body so hollow and cavernous, but now I realized the beauty of nothingness, the deliciousness of being unattached. The nightly thunderstorms waned as summer nudged into fall. The leaves were drying out and changing colors, and the flowers shrivelled into seeds to be scattered by the wind, or birds, or deer. Chilly mornings were forgotten in the afternoon heat, but the air cooled again much too quickly after the sun sank below the horizon.

One dawn, the sun rising in a spectacular scarlet painting, I suddenly felt the bees tense up around me, I felt their fear and their anger, and for the first time since we arrived I, too, was scared, although I did not know what for. So many bees hung in the air, waiting, and from the darkness of the trees emerged a hulking shadow. It was a bear, enormous and lumbering, shaggy winter coat shining in the morning sun, eyes sparkling greedily as it sniffed the air. Then it bolted towards me, impossibly graceful for such a bulky animal, leaping across the meadow in mere seconds as I stood dumbly, rooted to the spot. It stopped several feet away from me, as though it had run into glass, then bellowed and pawed at its face as it was cloaked by bees. They covered its eyes, crawled inside its mouth and nose, sacrificing themselves to defend the hive, to defend me. The bear ran blindly, frenzied, and barreled into me, knocking me to the ground. I felt a momentary thrill as I touched its fur, then it roared and fled.

I hoped the bear would survive the attack, and also that it had learned to avoid this meadow. A thousand bees or more had died in the defense, and I felt the hive mourn their loss even as new workers emerged to take their place.

The first frost came some time later, a thin layer of sparkling ice coating the grass. The bees that night had clustered tightly, beating their wings in unison to generate heat. It was a biological furnace, converting sugar fuel into warmth, and efficient, too. When the chilled air warmed enough, only a few hundred workers took off to forage, and most came home with empty honey crops. The rest hummed anxiously for winter, and endlessly checked their stores of food, which would never feel like enough to survive.

Echo, meanwhile, had grown fat, her fur thick and unwieldy, yet she despised the cold and refused to step on the frost. The shack was not much of a shelter, but with the bees inside, it would be enough for her to not freeze, I hoped. I scarcely felt the cold, unless the bees did, even as my bare feet left footprints in the frost. The days grew shorter and we ventured out less and less, the bees unable to fly if it was too cold, and me too lazy, too comfortable, too empty to move.

I watched the first snowflakes of winter fall, and I recalled that snowy day in June with an unexpected sadness. It had only been a few months, but how many lifetimes was that for a bee? Worker bees lived short, hard lives, and a few months was several generations to them. Only the queen survived from one year to the next, until she, too, exhausted herself and was replaced. The workers had little tolerance for a failing queen, and would kill her if she did not leave herself.

The snowflakes piling on my shack reminded me suddenly of flakes of ash dancing in the sky, and I thought about how the bees had carried me from my window to safety, and I wondered how many bees it would take to lift me up now. How many lifetimes ago was 28 years for a bee? I remembered sitting in a patch of wet grass, watching as the flames glowed and grew in my bedroom window, and black smoke poured out of the house. When I worked with bees in grad school, I refused to use a smoker on the hives, because I hated the smell, hated the feeling of driving out the bees by suffocating them. It was a long time before any neighbors noticed the fire, we were too isolated, and the sun was starting to peak over the horizon when the first fire truck came screaming up the private driveway. I watched the firefighters jump out of the truck and start working, and they didn’t notice me right away. By that time my parents had been long dead.

Bees hibernate in the winter, but they do not sleep. There is work to be done: food stores constantly monitored, wings vibrating for heat, intruders attacked. I once opened a hive after winter to find a mummified mouse corpse tucked away in a corner, completely covered by wax and propolis to prevent the decay from spreading. I didn't really sleep, but I wasn’t really awake, either. On the rare day that it was warm enough to fly, the bees would emerge to stretch their wings, and I, too, would go for a walk, Echo hopping between my footprints behind me. I felt as though I was in a trance; a ghost, perhaps, invincible to the threats of the world.

The nights first grew impossibly long, then gradually shortened, allowing the sun to grace the Earth for longer stretches. The ever-present sticky sweetness in my mouth started to thin and fade, and moving around became a chore. Bees were dying, and every day the survivors gathered the dead into increasingly larger piles. The bees fretted, and I was anxious for them, because what would happen to me if they died? Even the best beekeepers still lose a quarter of their hives every winter. Without their life in mine, would my body collapse? I imagined robber flies finding me, tearing through my paper skin and emptying my body of anything edible. Our honey stores were shrinking, and as larvae began to hatch, it became clear the pollen would not last long either. We were dying, and I felt the hunger as an abyss, deep inside of me, pulling me down like a gravitational well.

Then, abruptly, like divine providence, it was spring again. Shoots of green leaves poked through the piles of melting snow, and the bees began to send out scouts after letting the sun warm their wings. The first time a scout returned with nectar, the bees celebrated by humming together, syncing their wings until instead of buzzing it was droning, and instead of hearing it I was feeling it, straight through my chest, and then I was celebrating with them, dancing and shouting, and Echo purring like the bees are inside her, too, because we had done it.

We had survived the winter.

Chapter 7

There is no rest for the wicked, and spring meant the bees needed to rebuild what they lost and prepare for the next winter. I, too, needed to recuperate, as I struggled to walk more than a few feet, my limbs so stiff from confinement. The sun hurt my eyes, and I felt grimy and stale as I picked my way through the meadow to the trees. I wondered if my body could tolerate a bath, or if my skin would just flake away in the water like ash.

I never learned how to swim, and although my third foster family had a pool in their backyard, it was empty the entire time I lived there. The woman, “Cherry,” she said, “like the fruit” was very fat, at least 400 pounds, and could not get up or walk by herself. She was a single mother with a 12 year old girl, twice my age and completely uninterested in a sister. Cherry had a little bell she would ring when she needed to go to the bathroom, or help rolling off a bed sore, or if she was hungry, and if I took longer than 10 seconds to get there she would smack me with a fly swatter. She didn’t just need help walking to the bathroom, either, but assistance balancing on the toilet, and manipulating the toilet paper stick she used to clean herself afterwards, and once every two weeks she would have me wash the voluminous folds of her skin as she sat in the bathtub. Sometimes she would demand I massage her lumberous, sweaty back, or her swollen, ulcerating feet. She was a revolting woman, inside and out, and for months after I finally left her house I smelled like spoiled garbage.

I had told this story to Kevin early on in our relationship, when he asked why I didn’t like holding hands, and I told him that I hated touching skin. I had meant it to be funny, but instead he just stared at me with a look of abject horror. “I can’t believe she made you do that,” he stammered. His anger saddened me, and I decided from then on to speak only neutrally, vaguely about my foster families; not dishonesty, not really, just lies by omission, but I hated lying to him. I had not yet met his parents, although he had spoken of them extensively, their love for him clear on his face as he recalled his childhood, and it was that day he decided to take me to his house for dinner.

Sara and Heather were impossibly talented individuals. Dr. Sara Fisher was a doctor, an ob/gyn, and it was her I pictured when I imagined telling them that I had so briefly carried their grandbaby, and lost it, and I pictured her eyes so full of pain and understanding and I couldn’t bear it. Heather was an artist. She always smelled like turpentine and lemongrass and marijuana. She was 15 years older than Sara, but it always seemed like she was so much younger, and Sara so much older.

When Kevin brought me over to their house, Sara was sleeping on the couch wearing scrubs, a spot of blood dried onto one shoulder sleeve. Bruce bounded into the house, his job done the moment we stepped through the threshold, and leaped onto the doctor, licking her face all over. She got up laughing, then introduced herself, taking my hand in both of hers, and she was like sunshine. Then Kevin led me upstairs, and we passed by a door to the right with a pink sign with “Alex’s Room. Keep Out!” written in childish, looping cursive, and I wondered why he had never spoken about an Alex. The next door was his room, all dark colors and lit by half a dozen aquariums.

Finally we went up another flight of stairs, and emerged into a dimly lit attic that was hazy with pot smoke, where I met Heather. I admired her artwork, landscapes in a huge variety of styles, and she told me she was trying to see the world “the way everyone else sees it.” I told her that honey bees could see ultraviolet light, and that flowers look vastly different to them, with stripes that direct them to the center of the flower, and Heather clapped her hands in delight and gave me a hug. A few months later she presented me with a small postcard landscape in fluorescent colors, the flowers vibrantly streaked, and said she was going to next try to paint what a bee smells.

Kevin’s house was so warm and inviting, I couldn’t even feel jealous of him. After that night I stayed over at their house at least once a week. I spent many afternoons in the attic with Heather, and she let me use her canvases and paints, taught me the difference between a gouache and a wash and what brushes to use when. I was not very good, and mostly painted animals, but I loved the process regardless. Sara was often called away at odd hours to assist a birth, but she never seemed to mind staying up late for card games or waking early enough to make pancakes.

After dinner that night we retreated to Kevin’s room, and when we passed by the door labelled “Alex” I asked him about it. He got very quiet, and he told me about his sister, Heather’s biological child, who happened to share a birthday with him. Alex called Kevin a freak when they first met, then stomped around and slammed her door, but the next day she found him outside and showed him a tiny, white praying mantis she had found, and they quickly grew close. I sat there on his bed, watching the light from the aquariums reflected on his ceiling, and tried to imagine Kevin as a child. “What happened to her?” I finally asked.

“She died when we were 12,” he answered. “She was deathly allergic to bees, but we didn’t know until that day she stepped on one in the garden.” This was the real reason he hated honey bees, although he never admitted it to me. Kevin was not allergic to bees, we learned, and he helped me during my sampling trips each summer, collecting honey bees into a vial to freeze and test for pesticides. He always handled the hives and the bees so gently, carefully, lovingly.

My birthday is the spring equinox, March 20, and I knew it was soon because the days and nights were nearly the same length. I was turning 30, and I thought about my novel, and my desire to do something significant. I felt so very significant to the bees, and the bees felt so very insignificant to the whole world. I got up early on that day, before the bees had even warmed up, and we moved sluggishly together through the morning cold. Echo followed as I wandered into the woods and made my way to a creek that was overflowing with icy snowmelt. I dipped my fingers in it, considering the integrity of my skin, or the hive, or whatever I was. It was bitter cold and an angry buzzing rose in my chest. I plunged my entire hand into the water, and when it did not fall apart, I stood and stepped into the icy stream.

The water was only knee high, but moving fast. I knew all about the dangers of running water and flash floods, but I ignored the warnings in my head as I sat down in the middle of the stream. The cold felt like a punch to my chest, and I gasped but no air came in. I leaned my head back and dipped my hair in the water, then my head, and finally completely submerged myself in the water.

Underwater, there was no humming, no buzzing. My entire body ached in the cold, and I no longer felt dry and hollowed out. As I lay there the sensation of life crashed through me like a lightning bolt, all of my nerves firing at once, and then I burst out of the water and sucked in the mountain air. Echo watched me condescendingly as I stepped out of the creek, shivering so hard I couldn’t tell at first if the bees were still there, or if I had killed them. I sat in the sun, the pain of thawing worse than that of freezing, and I delighted in feeling it.

Eventually my shivering ceased, but the buzzing remained, and I was grateful for my bees. The day turned out to be bright and hot, and I wandered lackadaisically around the woods, letting the bees forage from fresh flowers, and I realized too late that I had walked farther than I intended to when I stumbled onto a well-worn hiking trail at the same time a well-equipped backpacker crested the hill.

Part 2

Chapter 8

It was snowing in June the day the honey bees disappeared, although it would not become obvious until later that they were gone. Dr. Kevin Fisher fell asleep that night with his window open, enjoying the icy breeze, and had awoken the next morning to frost accumulating on the blackout curtain he hanged over every window, and he thought he could see his breath fogging. A thrilling sense of foreboding ran through him, and he considered pulling the comforter over his head and staying in bed all day. He couldn’t, of course, he was still fresh meat as a professor, having just finished up his post-doc work and accepted a real professorship in March, and couldn’t afford to call out for nothing.

As Kevin pulled himself out of bed, his guide dog, a too-young, too-eager black lab named Hugo, bounded around the room, clearly more excited about the freak snow storm than he was. Kevin let the dog outside to run off some of his excess energy before making himself a cup of coffee. Breakfast was a couple of leftover apple muffins his mum had brought over to his house the day before the snowstorm. When Dr. Sara Fisher found the time to bake between the seemingly endless stream of new babies to deliver, Kevin had no idea, and a part of him wished his moms would take a break from mothering him. Not because he didn’t appreciate it, but because he felt like they deserved a vacation, somewhere exotic and warm, somewhere it would never snow in June. Kevin would probably never be able to afford to send Sara and Heather on a vacation, not on a university salary, not that they would ever ask, or even accept it if he offered, but he still dreamed of the day.

The snow had nearly melted by the time Kevin arrived at campus, his office in an old, outdated building that probably still had lead paint in the walls. Many other departments were riding high on the STEM wave, practically wallpapering their shiny new labs with dollar bills, buying up the latest and greatest testing equipment, but for some reason ecology had fallen out of favor. Probably political, Kevin thought, and he wasn’t too bitter about it, except when he needed to beg to use another department’s equipment.

Kevin’s first summer semester as a full professor was an easy schedule. He was only teaching Intro to Field Ecology, filled with freshmen too eager to start their classes and seniors who had put off their required science credits until the last minute. The class was mostly field work, and though the sun was Kevin’s mortal enemy, he loved to sit outside and listen to the birds. He often told others he was allergic to the sun, but it wasn’t strictly true. It burned his eyes, even if he wore the darkest sunglasses he could find, and standing in it for just a couple minutes was a guaranteed hot pink sunburn for his skin.

A name on an email he received a few minutes before 9:00 caught Kevin’s attention, and he had to think for a moment for where he knew it from. Merle White was a beekeeper he had met a couple times while helping his ex with her research on honey bees, but Kevin had no idea why the man would be emailing him, especially since Astrid had left the university several years ago. Thinking about Astrid made Kevin’s chest ache as he skimmed over the email.

“Dr. Fisher,

I’m sorry for reaching out like this. I tried to find the young lady who was working with me a couple years ago on my hives, but she wasn’t on the university pages anymore. I recognized your face though, and I was hoping you or someone would be able to come out to the apiary and check some things out… Kinda hard to explain here, you’ll have to see it. Give me a call, please.

Bee well,

Merle”

Merle left a number, and when Kevin dialed it, he picked up almost immediately. “Merle’s Bees and Buns, how can I help you?” He had a thick, southern accent, and if Kevin remembered correctly, he was almost 80 years old now.

“Hi, Mr. White, it’s Dr. Fisher, you emailed me this morning?”

“Fisher? Oh right, right, the albino kid. I’m glad you called me, I don’t suppose y’all could come down here this morning? It’s kind of important.”

Kevin had no idea where Merle was located. Astrid had driven them all around the state to visit different apiaries, occasionally far enough away that the university paid for a hotel for them. “I’m going to have to check my schedule, could you tell me more about what you need?”

“You’re gonna have to see it to believe it my man. All my bees just vanished. Poof, gone, overnight! I’m telling you, y’all need to get down here.”

Chapter 9

“Vanished?” Dr. Gerald Allen, the ecology department head, looked down at Kevin skeptically.

“That’s what Mr. White said.” Kevin hated being around Dr. Allen; the man was always condescending, plus he’d been Astrid’s advisor, and she’d have very few kind words to say about him. Fortunately, Dr. Allen worked exclusively with honey bees, and Kevin was usually able to avoid collaborating with him until now.

Dr. Allen rubbed his face with his hands. “God, don’t tell me this is another CCD thing.” Colony collapse disorder was the name penned by the media for the mysterious bee deaths that plagued apiaries. Not like a typical hive failure, CCD happened when most of the workers spontaneously abandoned a hive, leaving behind a perfectly healthy queen and brood; although without workers they, too, quickly died. The real mystery was what happened to the tens of thousands of workers, but research into CCD kept getting muddled up with all the pedestrian ways that bee colonies died. People picked up on it and started inventing all sorts of conspiracy theories about it, blaming everything from pesticides to climate change to WiFi signals.

“Not CCD,” Kevin responded, “The guy insists it’s all gone.”

Dr. Allen reluctantly allowed Kevin to visit Merle’s apiaries, but refused to join him. Secretly, Kevin was glad, even though he knew Dr. Allen’s expertise in honey bees was unmatched.

Merle White’s farm was in the eastern plains, about an hour away, but since Kevin couldn’t drive, he called Heather to see if she was free. “Hey Mimi,” he said when she answered the phone, “are you up for an adventure?”

Heather was always up for an adventure, always looking for new inspiration for her paintings, Kevin knew, just as he knew she stayed home most days just on the off-chance he would still need her for something. Although he could see well enough for most tasks, driving was impossible, and Kevin hated having to ask her every time he needed to go somewhere a bus wouldn't take him. He’s a smart man, an adult with a PhD, owns his own house with a backyard, and he is still so dependent.

Merle’s Bees and Buns was a small family farm in the middle of nowhere, and Heather had to make a couple of u-turns before she finally noticed a large, hand-painted wooden sign that was nearly faded. Kevin noted her sudden quietness as they pulled up, and regretted bringing her here. Heather’s daughter, Alex, died after an allergic reaction to a honey bee sting over a decade ago.

“Ah, shit, you’re like a ghost,” Merle commented, walking out of his garage to greet the duo. “No need to suit up, there’s nothing there.” Mostly out of habit, Merle offered Kevin a bee smoker, a metal contraption with a bellows and a spout, but Kevin declined. Astrid never used a smoker, so he had never used one, and ultimately it ended up not making a difference in how the bees reacted, as long as you were careful. “Dunno what I’m thinking, this thing’s useless anyway,” Merle grumbled, tossing the smoker into a pile of scrap wood.

Although Merle had adamantly insisted that everything had vanished, Kevin didn’t understand the magnitude of the loss until he saw it for himself. Merle’s apiary consisted of 20 or so Langstroth hives, each at least 3 boxes tall, and not a single bee remained in any of them, dead or alive. “Even the larvae’re gone,” Merle explained. “Honey stores look fine though.”

With Heather helping, it took the three of them less than 10 minutes to verify that all of the hives had been abandoned. Kevin took some pictures of the frames with his cell phone, and collected a few wax and honey samples. “I’m tellin’ ya, it’s that colony collapse thing, gettin’ worse every year,” Merle was telling Heather as Kevin finished up with the sampling. His mimi smiled wanly, and Kevin wasn’t sure if it was being around the honey bees or Merle that was making her so aloof.

It took a moment for them to find Hugo, who had found the bun half of Merle’s Bees and Buns, and was sniffing eagerly around the rabbits’ cages. When Merle offered them some honey, Heather accepted it gracefully. “Keep it, maybe honey will be more valuable than gold with all the bees gone,” he declared with a parting wave. Hugo rested his head on Heather’s shoulder as she drove them back to town, drooling heavily, and soon her face softened.

"I'm sorry," Kevin said, "I know you didn't want to be there." Kevin disliked honey bees, but Heather loathed them for taking her daughter away. He wondered if Heather felt just a little glad that so many had disappeared, but he knew she was too kind at heart to hold on to the schadenfreude for more than a second.

Dr. Allen was waiting for Kevin when he came into the lab with the samples from Merle’s hives. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said, eyes wide, face flushed, a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

“I might,” Kevin responded, the profoundness of the morning settling heavily on him. “The guy I talked to this morning wasn’t kidding. His bees just disappeared.”

“He’s not the only one,” Dr. Allen responded gravely, “I’ve heard from at least 20 people today, asking about the same thing.”

“Oh, god.”

“Ours are gone, too. There’s nothing there. It’s a ghost town.”

Chapter 10

The next couple days were hectic as it seemed like everyone in the department had been drafted to sort out the honey bee mystery. Kevin stayed late each evening, fielding constant calls and emails asking about the bees. On Friday, a newspaper had picked up on the story, headline screaming: “Missing Honey Bees: A Sign of the Endtimes?” Concerned citizens began sending in their grainy cell phone photos of blurry yellow insects, asking if it’s one of the missing bees, leaving voicemails about how it was the cell phone signals, Satanists, lizard people. Kevin spent all of his free time contacting known apiarists, and every single one of them described their hives as empty. The last time anyone had seen them was the day before it snowed.

Saturday morning Kevin found himself standing in front of a law office, talking to a paralegal who claimed to have some honey bee specimens that had attacked him after the bees supposedly vanished. The paralegal introduced himself as Erik Stansford, and his handshake was a death grip. The man showed Kevin the still swollen spots on his arm where he claimed to have been stung, then Kevin zoned him out as he explained his theory that the bees had all just swarmed, and they were probably just living in the trees now, and everyone was just making a big deal about nothing.

“Hey, there’s the boss,” Erik said suddenly, gesturing at a family walking down the sidewalk, then called out to them, “What, Bee Girl not gracing us today?”

The men introduced themselves as Matt Jonas and Samuel Williams, and their little boy Joey. The boy hopped up and down in excitement when he saw Hugo. “That’s a working dog,” Matt explained to the boy, “You can’t pet him.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Kevin told Joey, whose face had fallen, “if it’s okay with your dads, we can let Hugo out of his harness when we’re done here and let him take a break.” Joey’s face instantly cheered.

“Thank you for coming in on a weekend,” Matt said as he unlocked the office, “We actually have a bee expert here, but she’s been out since Thursday.”

There were a dozen dead bees in the office, significant only because they had been seen alive after the day of the snow storm, making them the last known honey bees, at least in the state. Kevin confirmed they were honey bees, then asked where they had come from.

“They just appeared outta nowhere,” Erik insisted. “It was right after Astrid got here.”

Kevin’s stomach dropped. “Astrid?”

“Bee girl. Hey, maybe she’s got some bees in the lab?"

Chapter 11

Time seemed to dilate as Kevin stared at the dead honey bees lined up on the desk, unable to move, unable to think of anything besides the last time he had seen Astrid. He realized this must be the office she had gotten her internship at, just a week or so before breaking up with him. She broke it off by phone, her voice sounding pale and robotic, then she'd ghosted him entirely, as though their years together had been a fever dream. He thought maybe they'd run into each other on campus, but by the end of the semester he’d learned she dropped out. The grant that had supported her research had been pulled, and though she could have easily applied for more, she vanished instead.

Astrid's office looked exactly how Kevin had expected it would. Files cluttered on her desk, but Kevin knew there was a system to them, however incomprehensible it may appear to anyone else. There was not much of a lab, and when Kevin opened the sample freezer there were no signs of bees.

One of the lawyers, Matt, had followed Kevin into the lab. "We had the exterminator yesterday, but he had no idea where they came in from. No obvious signs of forced entry," he chuckled.

"Did you see them?" Kevin asked.

"They were in full swing by the time I got here. Hundreds of them, crawling and flying and bumping into everything. Erik's the only one who got stung though, as far as I know. Astrid didn’t mention anything."

“So much for Bee Girl,” Erik called out from his desk. “Astrid ran away from them like a puppy with its tail between its legs.” Although he'd only just met Erik, Kevin felt a hint of satisfaction that the arrogant man had gotten attacked.

There was nothing more to do in Astrid's office, but Kevin didn't want to leave, so he puttered around a few more moments, absorbing her faded presence. His phone rang, and when he answered, it was Dr. Allen on the other end.

"Have you ever been to a morgue?" he asked, instead of a greeting. Of course he hadn't. "They're saying they found a guy dead in an alleyway downtown. They think he died of anaphylaxis. Supposedly he was surrounded by dead bees."

"Supposedly?" Kevin was getting ready to leave Astrid's office when a small photograph, tucked behind her computer monitor, caught his attention.

"Can't trust anyone, everything with six legs and a couple of stripes is a honey bee to them. I'm up north, I need you to go collect those bees. Bring them back to my lab when you're done." Kevin agreed to go to the morgue and turned to leave, hesitating a second before quickly darting over to Astrid's computer and picking up the mostly obscured photograph. It was a photo of the two of them at the zoo. He remembered it, an elderly woman had taken it, struggling with the touchscreen on Astrid's phone. They'd laughed together at how the woman had managed to take the worst possible photo, Astrid in shadows and underexposed, Kevin blindingly overexposed, the focus set on a giraffe behind them. Without realizing what he was doing, Kevin slipped the photo in his pocket.

After fulfilling his promise to Joey and letting Hugo tire himself out with a tennis ball, Kevin made his way to a bus stop and rode to the hospital. A friendly pathologist met with him and asked if he wanted to see the body, much to Kevin’s surprise. Not quite knowing what the protocol for this was, he agreed, although he explained it was nearly impossible to tell what had stung a person after the fact just by looking at the marks. The man's body was hideously swollen, and the pathologist said he counted at least 500 stings.

"Did you save any of the bees?" Kevin asked.

"There were a few trapped in his clothes I saved, but definitely not all of them. I removed some stingers that were still stuck in him, too." Kevin stared at the corpse on the table, and then the bees that had killed him. They, too, were proper European honey bees, and since the man had been killed in the evening the same day the law office had been infested, they, too, were now an important part of the timeline.

That night Kevin went to his parents' house for dinner, something that happened frequently despite moving away. Sara was in the kitchen, and when he asked if she needed any help, she waved him off and asked him to go find mimi.

Heather was usually found in the attic, but as he walked into the hallway he noticed Alex's door was opened, and he gave a light tap on the doorframe before stepping inside. Heather was laying in Alex's bed, Kevin’s guide dog sprawled out beside her. "I'd wondered where you'd gone off to," he scolded Hugo, sitting down next to them. He scratched the dog’s ears, tail thumping on the bedspread.

"Do you remember the first time you met Alex?" Heather asked, abruptly breaking their silence.

"Of course. She called me a freak," Kevin grinned, remembering her gap toothed smile and freckled skin.

"She was so excited for you, did you know?"

"I must've been a huge disappointment."

"Nope, we ruined it for her the night before, when we realized you both had the same birthday." Heather grinned, the same mischievous smile Alex used to give before getting Kevin in trouble.

"She never wanted to share," Kevin sighed dramatically.

Heather was silent for a moment longer, sitting up on the bed before saying, "You know I don't blame you, right? I don't blame the honey bees, either."

"I do." He meant both.

Heather reached her arm around Kevin in a hug, burying her face in his shoulder. "It was just really shitty luck," she murmured into his shirt.

"Do you believe in fate, mimi?" Kevin asked when she pulled away.

"You know I do."

Kevin pulled out the photograph he'd taken off Astrid's desk. “I found where Astrid works.”

Heather stared at the photograph in trembling hands. When Astrid had broken up with Kevin, it was Sara who had consoled him; Heather had loved Astrid in her own way, and although she never said it, she, too, felt betrayed when Astrid left them. “Did you talk to her?” she asked.

“She wasn’t there. It was a law office that claimed to have had a swarm the day after the bees disappeared. They were some of the last bees anyone has seen.”

Heather handed the photograph back to Kevin. “This may be a sign,” she said, voice tinged with sympathy, “but my only concern is that it doesn’t mean what you want it to mean.”

*        *        *

On Monday, Kevin called the law office of Williams & Jonas again, asking for Astrid. “Bee girl isn’t here,” Erik said, “Didn’t even bother calling in. Hey, any news about those bees?” The investigation into the missing bees was stagnating. Aside from the handful of dead bees Kevin had retrieved over the weekend, there had been no sightings in managed or wild hives. The bees from the law office and the dead man had appeared normal, and all of the tests were coming up normal. No significant pesticide exposure; no new or mutated diseases; they were not malnourished. The hives left behind showed no signs of parasitic invasion.

The only silver lining was that no other members of the insect biome had been affected. Native bees were flourishing, although farmers were perturbed, worried their crops would fail without the honey bees.

Most people understand beekeeping for its products, like honey and wax, but those are not the reason commercial-scale beekeeping exists. Migratory beekeeping is the practice of transporting bees to fields for the specific purpose of pollinating the flowers and boosting yield. Honey bees are supergeneralists, and will pollinate pretty much anything, even though there are other bees that are more specialized for certain crops. Almonds, however, rely entirely on honey bees, and beekeepers will drag their hives from all over the country to pollinate in California, before trudging them back home after a few short weeks. Migratory beekeeping is also terrible for the bees, who spend too much of their lives packed up in dark, overheated trucks, moving from one state to another, allowed only a few weeks at a time to forage and build their honey stores. In popular culture, beekeeping is a peaceful, environmental practice, but in reality bees are nothing more than livestock to the major beekeepers. Their losses are not an indication of some greater environmental catastrophe, but an economical one.

In the United States, honey bees are an invasive species - they were imported from Europe, and even devastated some native populations as they pushed out the less aggressive solitary bees. At the same time, they’re canaries in a coal mine; what affects honey bees, affects native bees, and what benefits one usually benefits the other. Kevin always advocated for the native bees; Astrid always advocated for whatever could benefit both.

When Kevin called Astrid’s work again a few days later, it was Sam he spoke to. “She hasn’t been in all week,” he said, “We called the police to do a welfare check, and they said she wasn’t at home, either. No signs of anything wrong, just vanished.” A police report had already been filed, and Sam gave a number to call if he had any information.

Kevin wondered briefly, absurdly, if Astrid’s vanishing had had anything to do with the bees, but he quickly shook the thought away. Astrid certainly had a history of disappearing without explanation, and it was, of course, impossible for a single person to disappear billions of bees across the entire country in a single night.

Chapter 12

The summer passed by in a blur of frustrating dead ends and bee conspiracies. Not a single lead had uncovered any honey bees. Several times a week, Kevin would arrive at a site where a homeowner claimed there were honey bees, only to uncover predatory yellow jackets, bumbling carpenter bees, or, once, a hive of viciously territorial bald-faced hornets.

It quickly became clear that this was an international phenomenon; beekeepers and researchers around the world reported missing honey bees, wild or otherwise. Even other sub-genera, such as the giant cliff dwellers of Indonesia and the stingless honey bees of Southeast Asia, had vanished. Genetic testing would have to be done on whatever samples remained tucked away in the backs of university freezers, in Bayer and Monsanto laboratories, or old research projects that were sidelined now that there was nothing left to research.

Kevin felt himself descending into a haze as the hot summer days stretched on. His nights were spent tossing and turning in a nervous insomnia, his days foggy from exhaustion. He remembered reading an article a while back about dogs that had been trained to smell certain bee diseases, and wondered if he could train Hugo to sniff out honey bees. He exposed the dog to all of the samples in his lab, his nostrils flaring as he inhaled the aroma of long-dead frozen bees, wax and honeycomb, even the components in the major pheromones bees produced. Hugo learned quickly and responded to the scents, tracking them down from wherever Kevin hid them in the office, but outside he showed no sign of recognizing any smells. Kevin began going on long hikes with his guide dog, just on the off-chance they ran across something, but he was not hopeful.

The school year began with a nightmare of grant cancellations and funds pulled. It seemed as though half the ecology department was researching honey bees in some way or another, and without any subjects at least a dozen graduate students were unable to continue their theses entirely. Kevin and the rest of the department were scrambling to find new grants to fund new research, but starting a project like that from scratch was a major endeavour. There was plenty of uncharted territory in the field of ecology, but the missing bees loomed over them, too important to ignore, but impossible to proceed.

Food shortages loomed on the horizon, too, as farmers reported disturbingly low yields for the season. This encouraged the conspiracy theorists, and on the first day of the fall semester, Kevin and several of his coworkers received death threats in the mail, simply for the crime of having published works on honey bees. It was ironic that they should be blamed for an ecological disaster, considering every other bee besides Apis was thriving. Kevin took his field ecology classes out sampling, and they came back with a surprising number of solitary mason bees and bumblebees, more than he had ever seen in the wild before.

After a few weeks the dramas of funding and protesters settled, and Kevin found himself glad for the distraction of teaching. He could go in front of a classroom and lecture and not have to think about bees, although at least once a week in the middle of a lecture a student would inevitably find a way to segue the conversation into the question on everyone’s mind: “Where did they go?” The only answer he could offer: “No idea.”

Kevin was asking himself the same thing about Astrid. The missing person’s report on Astrid remained untouched, just a name and description, no reported sightings after she left work the day she disappeared. The investigation had stalled, and the police were already concerning themselves with other matters. A dull, omnipresent headache settled behind his eyes as he scoured the internet for signs of life from Astrid, but she had no Facebook, no online presence at all, and Kevin began to worry he had lost the plot. He felt himself sinking into a depression, similar to the one he felt the first time Astrid disappeared on him, the old wound ripping open.

Fortunately, Hugo wouldn’t allow him to wallow in bed all day, and when Kevin wasn't lecturing at the university they walked for hours a day together. The pain from the sun in his dyspathetic eyes almost countered the ever present stress headache he’d been experiencing. He let Hugo lead during these walks, numbly following the guide dog’s whims. Fall used to be Kevin’s favorite season, as his and Alex’s birthdays fell on the autumnal equinox, September 22. He remembers childhood autumns with Alex in shades of gold and red, his eyes already too poor by 7 to see more than a few feet in front of his face. He loved cloudy fall days, when he could go outside without a constant headache, without so much protection. Halloween was in fall, and the first day of school, Thanksgivings with Sara and Heather; all of his favorite days in the year were in the Autumn.

Now Kevin dreaded his birthday, he refused to celebrate it without Alex, and the autumn days were too dry, too hot, too windy. Kevin and Astrid had joined an Extinction Rebellion movement in college after an oil pipeline burst, dumping thousands of barrels of foul-smelling, sticky black oil over a miles-long stretch of land. They spent a week together elbows deep in soapy water, hands chafing under rubber gloves as they scrubbed the oil off sad looking waterfowl and small mammals. Every time they went hiking, Astrid would bring an extra bag for trash they’d find along the way. The most disturbing find was a couple of used condoms, dangling off a tree branch like a pair of wet slugs. The studied the direct effects of climate change as they hiked around the forest on sampling trips, tracking the spread of a tree killer. The mountain pine beetle is a native, non-invasive pest. It lays eggs under the bark of pine trees, and it carries a blue stain fungus that spreads through the xylem and phloem of the tree, consuming the tree's nutrients and killing it within weeks. It takes a certain amount of pine beetles to properly infest a tree, and in a natural ecosystem, the trees can defend against their attacks. However as temperatures increased and drought conditions became the new norm, trees were weakened, unable to defend themselves. Beetle populations rose, and then there were enough to attack healthy trees, and increase their range to forests that used to be too cold for them - a direct impact of climate change.

Hugo pulled at his leash. He seemed to have perked up, like he was looking for something. They had wandered into a rural area, highway surrounded by large empty fields that were over-mowed and nutritionally deficient, providing no natural forage for pollinators or wildlife. Hugo pulled Kevin into one of the fields and pawed at the ground, and then a knife flashed, covered in something that was too sticky to be blood, and Kevin realized that Hugo was just following his training.

Chapter 13

The police didn’t ask many questions, just asked if Kevin had touched the knife, if his fingerprints would be on it. He knew better than that. They placed the knife in a plastic evidence bag, labelled with the date and location, and told him they would be in touch if they needed anything else from him.

A week later Sara was pounding on the door of Kevin's house, praying he had not yet heard the news. She caught him as he crumpled to the floor, anguished. The knife that Hugo found had fingerprints belonging to a man named Michael Turner, 34, and a woman named Astrid Greenwood, 29. Blood belonging to the missing Greenwood was found on the knife, as well as a substance identified as honey.

Even more unbelievably, Michael Turner had been the man killed by bees earlier in the summer. Kevin remembered his pallid skin, swollen with stings, a look of pain and terror frozen on his face. The man had been found across the street from a bar. The bartender remembered Turner and Greenwood; a swarm of bees had attacked the man, and he stormed out without paying. The woman remained a while longer, evidently unfazed about the bees, which eventually disappeared. Police think Turner assaulted Greenwood in the alley, at some point stabbing her, before succumbing to bee stings. The small amount of blood found at the site indicated Greenwood may not have sustained fatal injuries.

Sara drove Kevin and Hugo home; his moms' home; Alex's home. He lay in his old bed the entire weekend, his room pitch black. He didn't want to look at the empty fish tanks, a reminder of the old nights laying with Astrid in the glow of the aquariums. Kevin did most of the talking, Astrid just listening with her whole heart. She remembered everything, even the tiniest details in the stories Kevin told her. She loved symbolism, and would draw parallels between his stories to show how they meant everything. How everything depends on everything else, and your present is a malleable clay mold made possible by thousands of little changes in the past; thousands of little decisions. Tiny actions and tinier words. The clay wasn't the past, but it was a shape of the past.

Another clue emerged later that fall: the bloody fingerprints on the blade and the handle were Astrid's, indicating that she had been covered in her own blood when she handled the knife. Had she pulled out the knife herself? Could she survive such a wound? Then there was the incongruous honey, mixed so thoroughly with her blood that forensicists had trouble finding enough cells for DNA. Astrid's apartment was undisturbed; she had left her phone and wallet behind, a mug of tea shattered on the floor. She'd had a cat, but it was absent, too. Her laptop and other valuables were untouched.

Kevin hosted Thanksgiving for his moms, insisting they relax while he prepared the meal, but somehow Sara ended up in the kitchen with him, peeling the potatoes, watching over the cranberry sauce. Kevin's recipe came from Astrid, who had a sweet tooth and especially loved cranberry sauce: not the canned stuff, but freshly made from whole berries. Sara chatted as they worked fluidly together; she always coped with emotions by talking and reminiscing, and today she was remembering the last Thanksgiving they'd had together with Astrid. She started staying with them during breaks, when the dorms closed, and often made them exquisite meals.

That particular day they were discussing Astrid’s research, and Sara asked her why she was interested in honey bees. Astrid had quickly, almost imperceptibly glanced at Heather before lowering her face to her plate and muttering something about how she had a sweet tooth as a kid, and really loved honey. It was awkward and bizarre for Astrid to be so evasive, but for the rest of their time together, she would never offer a better answer. Once she’d even tried to claim it was the only opening available, which Kevin knew was a lie.

“I have a confession to make, Kev,” Sara said suddenly, casually, as though she wanted him to think the thought had just come to her but had secretly been mulling it over for weeks, or longer.

“What’s that, mum?”

Sara hesitated for a moment, then said, “That night, way after you all went to bed, I found Astrid in the kitchen, and we shared some ice cream and chatted. She told me not to tell you, or Heather.”

Kevin looked over at her, surprised. “What was it?”

“The real reason she wanted to study honey bees. She claimed they saved her life once, when she was a baby. The night her parents died.”

Kevin knew Astrid’s parents had died in a house fire when she was 18 months old, but she never mentioned how she’d survived. “What does she think happened?” he asked.

“She told me they woke her up and carried her from her second story window.” Sara had removed the cranberry sauce from the stove and was intently watching the steam curl up from the cooling pan.

Kevin wasn’t surprised that Astrid had wanted to hide this from him; that she believed bees had saved her life, when one had so devastated his own. He was surprised that Sara had held on to that secret for so long, but he had always trusted his mum with his own secrets, apparently for good reason.

The weeks after Thanksgiving were a rush of last-minute lessons, crammed into the short weeks before finals. It also meant a constant flow of students in Kevin’s office, each one with their own reasons for why they deserved extra credit, more time to study, an extension on a paper that had been due since October. If anything, it became worse during finals week, students begging to know exactly what would be on the test and demanding to know their final grade as soon as they turned it in. Kevin felt trapped and claustrophobic everytime he had to cut short a walk in the bleak December air, but the light at the end was within reach. After he responded to all of the emails, marked up all of the finals, and submitted the final grades, Kevin had a month to relax, with minimal responsibilities between semesters.

The week before Christmas, on a whim, Kevin decided to find the bar where Astrid was last seen alive. The sidewalks were slushy and the wind was bitter, and after a crowded bus ride and a half-mile walk Kevin arrived at the bar with a sign reading “CLOSED FOR THE YEAR” taped in the doorway. He groaned and looked around, wondering if there was a coffee shop nearby. He crossed the street and couldn’t resist looking in the alley where someone had died, killed by honey bees, possibly after stabbing Astrid. Hugo was delighted to find a couple desiccated bee bodies that had been blown into a corner with some leaves and other detritus, and Kevin felt an unexpected pride for his guide dog. There was nothing for him here, however: no hidden clues that the police might have missed; no special essence of Astrid that only he could detect.

Kevin let Hugo pick an arbitrary direction to walk on the street, and shortly thereafter he heard a little boy calling, “HUGO!” Kevin recognized the kid as Joey, the son of Sam Williams and Matt Jonas, and saw him standing in the doorway of a basement apartment, at the bottom of a small flight of stairs. Sam noticed him from just inside the door and gestured at him to come down. “Dr. Fisher, what a coincidence! Tell me, any news on what happened with the honey bees?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Kevin said, and he quickly explained that everything honey bee related had reached a dead end. He entered the apartment feeling awkward, but glad to be out of the cold. “Is this your place?”

“Oh, no,” Sam said, “This is poor Astrid’s. I’m sure you’ve heard?” He went on to explain about an eviction notice, removing Astrid’s things to storage in case she returned, but Kevin stopped listening. A humming sound filled his ears as he looked around. The sheer coincidence of his being here didn’t even shock him anymore; it was rapidly becoming clear to him that he was no longer in control of his own destiny.

The studio apartment was bizarrely generic, none of the vibrant personality Kevin would expect from Astrid. Her dorm room had been decorated with posters of wildlife, insects, scientific diagrams, and later paintings she had made in Heather’s studio attic. She had a love for fairy lights, which worked well with Kevin’s sensitive eyes, and had a small fish tank filled with snails on her desk. She could tell all of the snails apart; she even had a name for each of them, and would describe their personalities as vividly as a dog’s. She collected books and they overflowed on the single built-in bookshelf in her dorm room.

In contrast, this apartment had no decorations and minimal furniture: a bed tucked in one corner, a couch and coffee table but no TV. The stacks of books Kevin remembered from Astrid’s dorm had multiplied and were piled on the floor. The corner of the only window was broken, and the realization that this place was Astrid’s, after so many years still cheerless and broken and dismal, crushed him.

Feeling somewhat like a stalker, Kevin asked if Sam and Matt needed any help, and they accepted gratefully. He removed Hugo's work vest so Joey could play with him, tossing a yellow tennis ball around the too small flat, then decided to pack up the books, which he hoped was the least invasive way to assist the attorneys, Astrid’s bosses.

Astrid had a ton of books, possibly literally. She had always loved browsing the shelves at thrift stores, picking up 50 cent paperbacks at random and reading them no matter how poorly they were written. She told Kevin once that her favorite part was when a seemingly innocuous book devolved rapidly into erotica; the more innocent the introductions, the more vulgar its descriptions of the lovers’ sex acts. She loved to read the passages out loud, watch Kevin’s face blush deeper and redder, laughter bubbling up in both of them until one of them cracked, usually him.

A well-worn copy of Astrid's favorite book, Thoreau's Walden , was on top of the last stack, and when Kevin picked it up, two postcards fell out. He recognized them immediately as his mimi's paintings. The first was one Heather had given Astrid shortly after he introduced them for the first time. It was a landscape painted in vivid, supernatural colors, replicating the spectrum range of honey bees. The second one Kevin had never seen before, although it was Heather's style. It may have been a landscape, but the details were blurry and unrecognizable. Kevin turned the postcard over and recognized Heather’s spidery handwriting. The painting was titled “Scentscape,” and it was dated two years ago. Somehow his mimi had sent his ex-girlfriend mail long after she’d ghosted him.

An icy fury rose slowly in Kevin’s throat like bile as he glanced at the postcard again, scrambling to find some explanation for Heather’s betrayal, but besides the title and date, she had written no note. A tennis ball bounced past him, breaking his rumination, and a second later his black lab crashed into him, then past him, knocking over the entire stack of books. Sighing, Kevin slipped the postcards back into Walden and placed it in the box, then turned to pick up the newly scattered pile.

It was snowing when they finished packing up Astrid’s things, those fat, wet snowflakes that clumped together and stuck to your eyelashes. Joey pranced around with his tongue sticking out, trying to catch them. Sam insisted on giving Kevin a ride home, even as he declined. “Nonsense,” he said, huffing in the frigid air, “You helped us, the least we could do is drive you home.”

Kevin decided to give Sam directions to his parent’s house; to his mimi, to Heather. He sat somberly in the backseat with Hugo and Joey, glad for the kid’s incessant chatter filling the silence inside him.

Chapter 14

Kevin stood outside Sara and Heather’s home feeling for the first time in a long time like a stranger: an intruder. The first time he’d stood there like this he was 7, his mom had just died, and he had met Sara and Heather for the first time less than an hour previously at a McDonalds. Then his social worker was gone, and he was in the strangers’ car taking him who knows where. Kevin was overcome with the urge to jump out of the car, run into the forest, hide in a tree so high up no one would be able to find him.

One of the women, the older one, he couldn’t even remember her name at first, held his hand and gently guided him to the front door, over the threshold. She led him to a large room with too many couches, a huge TV in the corner. That was the first time Kevin saw Alex, red-haired and freckled, a look of pure hatred on her face.

“He’s a freak!” she’d shouted, pushing past them and storming into her room, and for the first time in his short life, Kevin felt freakish indeed.

After too long in the snow, Hugo shivering nervously next to him, clearly wondering why they were waiting outside when a warm couch was waiting for him, Kevin pushed the door open and entered the house.

His moms were in the kitchen, and Sara’s face lit up when she saw him. “Kev, what a nice surprise!” Kevin couldn’t speak, just stared at Heather while Sara bustled around him, offering him a drink or food, oblivious to Kevin’s indifference. Heather stared back at him, her face a mask, empty of emotion.

“You lied to me,” he said finally, and Sara looked up, shocked.

“Kev?”

“You lied to me,” he said again, ignoring his mum, and Heather finally looked away, abashed. Sara’s eyes flitted between them, confused. “You knew where Astrid lived,” Kevin stated, hoping the quiver in his voice wasn’t evident.

Heather closed her eyes as though in prayer, inhaling deeply before replying, “Yes.”

Sara gasped, but Kevin felt muted, underwater. Heather sat at the table a moment longer, her head bowed, before laboriously getting up and approaching him. Kevin felt a muscle in his jaw twitch, an anger he had not felt in years bubbling in his chest as his mimi put her hand on his shoulder, looking him straight in the eyes. “Come with me,” she said finally.

Heather led Kevin to her attic studio, its familiar smell of paints and solvents. She opened a chest in the corner and dug around, finally pulling out an old, yellow envelope, which she handed to him. Inside was a small stack of hand-made cards, less than a dozen of them, each illustrated with watercolors of various praying mantis species. Kevin turned one over and recognized Astrid’s scrawl. “Happy Birthday to Alex,” she’d written, “Thinking of you today.” Praying mantises had been Alex’s favorite insect; after calling Kevin a freak, Alex had spent an entire day in the woods, searching for a freshly molted white mantid to apologize to him.

“Astrid gave me a card every year for Alex’s birthday,” Heather explained. “She sent them, even after she broke up with you.”

Heather had lied to him, and so had Sara, and Kevin began to wonder if even his old guide dog, Bruce, had been Astrid’s secret confidant. He wondered what else Astrid had lied about in their relationship. He had spilled his soul out to her: she knew about his first kiss, and how when their classmates found out the boy had broken his heart and called him a ghost fag; the day his mom died; the time he’d peed his pants in second grade and Alex had helped him hide it. She giggled when he told her about the time he ate so many carrot sticks he’d turned orange from the beta-carotene collecting in his skin. His skin lacks any other pigmentation, so the orange was embarrassingly prominent for several long months. He’d told her about how, after Alex died, he would go out to the woods and dig under rocks and tree branches, searching for venomous rattlesnakes or black widow spiders. He would let the spiders crawl around on his hands, giant abdomens gleaming, pointed, sickly legs barely tickling his skin, and he would beg them to bite him, please, and they never would. Once he even stumbled upon a swarm of honey bees, dripping from a branch, and he’d chucked a rock at it. He’d been shocked that the bees didn’t attack him, but Astrid explained that swarming bees aren’t defensive, because they have nothing to defend.

Kevin read each of the postcards, although they did not offer any answers to his questions, and when he was finished he looked up to see Heather watching him intently. He couldn’t speak, his tongue felt sticky and thick in his mouth. He placed the cards gently back in the envelope, handed it to Heather, then turned and left the house without a word.

Chapter 1 5

Kevin spent Christmas alone for the first time in his life. He remembered the artificial trees his mother used to set up, rainbow lights twinkling. She would lift him up so he could place the angel on the very top branch, and then she would let go, let him think he was falling, and catch him in a big bear hug at the last moment.

His bio-mom was in hospice their last Christmas together. She’d had breast cancer, which metastasized despite months of excruciating chemo. Her skin had thinned and yellowed and she looked like a skeleton, bones sticking out of desiccated flesh, and Kevin spent Christmas day curled up with her on her bed. His mom stroked his white hair and told him about the day he was born: how red faced he was, his impossibly light, thin hair; the bright clarity in his lilac colored eyes. That first night in the hospital, she couldn’t stop looking at him, watching him, and she had never felt so much love before in her life. She recounted Kevin’s babyhood: his first steps, first words, the first time she took him to the zoo. She talked about her own childhood and her grandparents, his great-grandparents, who raised her, and her childhood cat Maya. Then she told him about his dad, who was such a kind man, so excited for their baby. How he had almost passed out when the doctor asked him to cut the umbilical cord, because no one had ever warned him about that part. Her voice trembled as she spoke of him, and she cried as she described the day she met the man who had drunkenly driven his father’s car off the interstate. The man had been devastated by his fatal decision to drive drunk, had almost killed himself, but slowly began recovering and devoted his life to helping people with substance abuse problems.

Before dozing off, she held Kevin’s face in her hands and stared intently into his eyes, as though she was trying to remember every detail. “My beautiful boy,” she said, then she released him and leaned back against the pillow, eyes closed, as if the effort had expended all of the energy left in her world. It was the last time he spoke to his mother; she died before the end of the year.

Kevin decided not to spend Christmas stuck in his house, and took Hugo down to a hiking trail in a small state park in the city. He walked on autopilot, listening to the crunch of the snow under their feet. His moms’ betrayals felt raw, even as he understood why they had lied to him, keeping Astrid’s confidence. What bothered him more was that Astrid had confided in them, not him, and he wondered if he had done something, something subtle, early on perhaps, that subconsciously betrayed her trust in him.

Maybe it was what happened with Dr. Evans. He had been walking down the hall in the evening when Bruce suddenly pulled on his harness, which was rare for him. Kevin pulled open the door as a lab cart was knocked over, a deafening crash of lab glass shattering, and then he was on the floor with Astrid, her sobbing and shaking. He called for an ambulance and university police arrived. Astrid was ashen, mute, eyes wide. “She’s in shock,” Kevin explained. He told them he’d seen the professor assaulting her, even though he couldn’t possibly see that far. He said that Bruce had barked, startling Dr. Evans who stumbled backwards and fell. The professor had a blood alcohol level of 0.12, and they accepted his explanation.

Campus police left them and Kevin suggested they go to a cafe, and she had nodded dimly. He ordered himself coffee, Astrid a chamomile tea, and they sat together in silence for an hour before she said, simply, “He didn’t fall. I pushed him.”

“I know,” Kevin replied. He insisted on walking her to her dorm, and by that time the last bus had already gone, so he milled around the dark waiting for Heather to pick him up, and he thought about how Astrid might have been the most beautiful person he has ever seen.

It was getting late. Somewhere in the trees, an owl was hooting, and Kevin felt removed from civilization entirely. He took off his glasses, and saw the world as he was born to see it: shades of colors, too blurred to make out any details. The twilight was painted in pinks and purples, and Kevin was suddenly reminded of the postcard he had seen in Astrid’s apartment, the one called “Scentscape.” The blurred tones from the woods around him matched those in Scentscape exactly; the same fuzziness and imprecision. Suddenly Kevin missed Heather and Sara fiercely, and regretted ignoring them on the holiday. He pulled out his mobile and sent Heather a text, and by the time they'd emerged from the woods, they were waiting for him at the trailhead with Santa hats and freshly baked cookies.

Chapter 16

The semester began in mid-January, but the beginning of the year left Kevin with little free time between lecture preparations, ordering lab supplies, and fielding the recent resurgence of inquiries about the missing bees. A local hiker had recently come across a black bear corpse in a nearby national forest, its body swollen with bee stings, honey bees tangled in its fur. It had died within the last couple months, well after the June vanishing day. The hiker had provided GPS coordinates for the body, and Kevin was already planning a search grid to walk through with Hugo to find the hive, even though they wouldn't be able to start until March at the earliest.

As his new students shuffled in the first week of classes, Kevin was pleased to recognize some of them from the last semester. His year-end reviews had been largely positive, and several wrote that they had chosen his classes specifically for the next semester. He had three preps this semester: Field Ecology, Insect Ecology, and Ecological Policies. Spring semester classes always started slowly, the weather preventing the field work that was the whole appeal of ecology classes. The Policies class was especially difficult to get into, as eco-law was always dry, and there was no field work to relieve it. He looked up recent cases in environmental law to share with the class, and was surprised to see a firm he recognized in recent news: Williams & Jonas. Apparently at the end of last summer, the attorneys had caught their paralegal, Erik Stansford, attempting to falsify data for a legal proceeding.

"That bastard Erik," Sam growled, voice crackling over the cell line. Kevin decided to call him, ostensibly to provide an update about the honey bee mystery, not that any progress had been made, and Sam had immediately launched into a rant about Erik.

"Is the firm okay?" he asked. He didn't think having falsified data associated with your name would make you a popular law firm.

"Well, we're not facing any legal action, at least. It turns out he was only able to get it out in this most recent case, and we caught it before any damage was done. I'm guessing Astrid was keeping him in check. She left some really good notes, was watching him like a hawk. All of the cases before she disappeared used the right reports."

As always, Kevin's stomach clenched when he heard Astrid's name. "Do you think her disappearance was related?" he asked.

"I definitely suggested the possibility to the cops every chance I got."

Kevin eventually hung up, but not before promising Joey, who had taken his dad's phone, that he would be by soon with Hugo at least three times. He decided he would expand the section on ethics in the policies class this semester.

In addition to his classes, Kevin was busy writing grant proposals. Dr. Allen had urged him to cash in on the bee disappearance, but without subjects, he couldn't think of how he would even begin to investigate the cause of the disappearance. Eventually he began writing up a proposal for a tangent: population studies on native bees, post-honey bee disappearance. Kevin encouraged his more promising students to apply for assistantships and work-study, then struggled to pick through the overabundance of applications for the limited spots without feeling as though he had let someone down.

The months passed by quickly, and as the weather warmed, Kevin grew eager to get out and track down the honey bees that had killed a bear. He decided he would start during spring break, and began packing for a long camping trip. There were several trails in the area where the black bear was found, and he picked one at random to start. Heather would drop Kevin and Hugo off at the trailhead on Sunday, then pick them up 5 days later on the other side; hopefully with some evidence of honey bees.

Part 3

Chapter 17

If Bigfoot is real, he’s probably just some guy. Maybe he was just going for a hike, or maybe he wanted to rough it in the woods, but he almost certainly just wanted to be left alone. Astrid knows what it was like to want to be left alone on a good day, but on her 30th birthday, stark naked in the middle of the woods, streaked with mud and honey and god-knows-what-else, she most definitely wants to be left alone.

The backpacker on the trail Astrid stumbles across is the first real person she has seen since June, and she sees herself through their eyes: feral, mad, exposed. They stare at her in stunned silence, then call out as she flees into the woods. She sprints a short way in, then scales a thick pine tree, hoping the bees will camouflage her body. She hears the person weaving through the undergrowth, squinting into the shadows for whatever demon thought they had seen. As they approach, Astrid sees it is an older woman with tanned, wrinkled skin, face shadowed under a floppy sun hat. The woman circles around the trees a few times, and the bees grow restless, territorial. They want the intruder gone. Astrid wills them to leave her alone, but they ignore her; angry, perhaps, for her negligence this morning. They buzz around the woman’s head; to scare her, not hurt her, but then she slaps at one that lands on her sleeve, and they are instantly on her. They only get a couple stings in before she gets away, possibly in deference to Astrid’s desire. She hopes the woman isn’t allergic to bees.

Astrid returns to her shack, now feeling it is too uncomfortably close to where people might wander, wonders if she should find a more isolated location. Seeing the woman had shocked her at the core, and she feels constantly unsettled, as though she has forgotten something very important. The bees are reluctant to transplant; they have learned this landscape, they know the best flowers and what predator hideouts to avoid, and relearning would waste valuable foraging time.

*        *        *

The woman Astrid’s bees attacked returns to civilization not much worse for wear, the stings no more than a mild irritation. She thinks about news of the vanishing bees, and wonders if she should report what happened to her. She has a vague idea of where she was when that strange figure crashed into the trail in front of her, and she briefly wonders if the person and the bees were connected. She shakes the thought away, recognizing its absurdity, and goes to her bathroom to take a long shower and wash the muck of the hike from her body. As she washes her hair, she thinks about that strange person, so tall and thin, the edges blurred as though an apparition. She decides it must have been an illusion. She doesn’t want to consider the alternative: that dementia her adult sons are so concerned about her developing spontaneously, begging her to reconsider living alone in her own house.

When she picks up her clothes from the bathroom floor the next day, a bee drops out, and she realizes it must have gotten trapped in the folds of her clothing. She picks it up, examining the fuzzy body, a gaping hole where the stinger had been. She realizes she should contact someone, although she isn’t quite sure who, or what she would say, just that she had been attacked by bees and clearly they haven’t disappeared entirely. On her computer, she finds an old news article about a scandal at a local university involving a tenured professor, Dr. Gerald Allen, being removed from his position after allegations of discrimination. The article claims Dr. Allen had been one of the world experts in honey bees. The woman searches for the university page, finds a list of other professors in the department, and clicks on one at random. The faculty profile page has his email address.

She thinks about how much to say. She takes a picture of the bee with her cell phone, and briefly writes up what happened and roughly where it had occurred. She decides against mentioning the apparition, concerned it might discredit her, and sends the email with a satisfying click.

*        *        *

Kevin returns from his backpacking trip empty handed, but optimistic. His time in the forest had been refreshing, cleansing, and despite the lack of any evidence of honey bees at all, he is not discouraged. He hadn’t realized how much he missed field work - his dissertation had been predominantly concerned with environmental policy, with just a couple cultivated acres as a prototype to demonstrate how replanting native plants would benefit the wildlife. His myopic eyes prevented him from doing extensive field work, and most of his experience came from helping Astrid. During their undergrad, Kevin and Astrid spent entire summers in the forest together, but he had not been camping since she disappeared. He had felt at home in the woods this spring break, and comfortable; the canopy of pine trees filtered the sunlight, relieving his vulnerable eyes, his ever-sunburnt skin. When he took his glasses off, the blurred landscape reminded him of his mimi’s painting, that scentscape. When he asked about it, she told him it was Astrid’s idea: a landscape of smells that guides honey bees to the best flowers.

Kevin returns to work the Monday after spring break, and is surprised to find an email from a woman who had been hiking in the woods just a few miles away from where he’d set up camp; just outside of bee foraging range. Attached to the email is a grainy, out-of-focus picture of a honey bee, which she claimed had stung her during her hike. She gave the name of the trail and approximately how far along the trail she had been when it happened. Kevin responds to the email, thanking her profusely for her contribution, and makes a note to check that trail over the weekend.

He never gets the chance, because just before spring break, Dr. Allen was removed from his tenured position, and Kevin’s workload doubled. In the previous year, one of his students had come to him in tears one day, alleging the professor had been treating her unfairly. After listening to her, Kevin had suggested they report him. The Office of Diversity and Inclusion had apparently already been investigating his previous dealings with students, and eventually uncovered enough evidence of his systematic discrimination against his female students to fire him. They revealed that women in his classes had consistently lower grades, for example, and he had been reaching out exclusively to male students whenever a new opportunity arose.

Kevin is surprised by the development, though not because he didn’t think Dr. Allen was sexist. He remembers Astrid’s complaints about her advisor all too well, and wonders now if Dr. Allen had been responsible for Astrid dropping out. The real surprise was that the university had decided to take the complaints seriously, and fired a tenured professor halfway through a semester. Unfortunately, it means the rest of the department has to take over his duties, and Kevin is also given the wearisome task of sorting through Dr. Allen’s office. He spends the weekend digging through a giant deep freezer that the professor used for sample storage. At the very back are bags full of large vials, labelled in his and Astrid’s messy handwriting. Scores of samples tucked away in the back that had never been sent for analysis; samples that he himself had helped take, sweltering in the beesuit under the summer sun. Kevin loved the bees for their industriousness, and he hated them for their greediness. Invasive and persistent, taking all of the nectar and pollen. A specially designed “pollen basket” on their legs held the pollen in tightly packed balls; that much less to pollinate the next flower.

Astrid and Kevin would collect bees into large tagged vials and immediately place them in a styrofoam cooler full of ice. They used metal hive tools to scrape the burr comb into little wax balls, bagged, labelled, and iced with the bees. Then, Kevin’s favorite task: scooping tiny balls of bee bread, cakes of pollen and honey. The minute hexagons of bee comb could only be seen up close, and Kevin’s nearsighted eyes benefited him here. Up close he could see each pollen packed hexagon was a different color, depending on what species of flower it had come from. It was a delicious palette, a stunning array of colors: yellow and white, reds and purples, the occasional green, and even blue.

Dr. Allen had neglected to even send the samples off for analysis. Astrid’s job had been the sampling, the modelling, the statistics. She had complained to the department head about not getting the data she needed; Dr. Allen had accused her of lying about what samples she had given him. They had always brought the samples directly to the freezer, the same one Kevin is emptying out now, and documented every hive they inspected. He packs these samples in a box and brings them to his own office. The analytics lab will still test them, and he sends some work-studies to do the lab work. Astrid deserves her data, and a small part of him hopes maybe it will bring her back.

With a greater course load, Kevin has no more free time, barely even time to take Hugo on a long walk, required to keep him calm. He deserves more, they both do, but Kevin is glad to be rid of Dr. Allen. He looks forward to the summer, to longer stretches of free time. Enough time to hike in the national forest and hope to get close enough to a hive for Hugo to be able to sniff it out. He was going to start with the trail the woman had emailed him about, have Hugo sniff around where the woman thought she was stung. It was justifiable research now; his grant had been funded by the state department of agriculture. Honey bees disappearing, it turns out, has a dramatic effect on crops, and this season is looking bleak for food security.

In the evenings he is helping his students with their research and independent projects: approving time cards, greenlighting research proposals, guiding them through grant proposals. The scientific world was expecting more and more from the younger scientists; high schoolers doing their own capstones, middle school kids getting published in Nature. The human species climbs and climbs the ladder, but just keeps building it up ahead of them with no regards for the limits of the body. What will happen when they wear themselves out, unable to climb any higher?

Chapter 18

Astrid lays in her shack and stares up at the sun through the branches, spitting colors onto the wall. Her body feels twitchy, like that of a dying bee; most pesticides are neuroactive, causing muscle spasms as they die. She wonders if there are pesticides in the national forest. Or possibly heavy metals, collecting in her muscles, her joints, her heart. She misses something, but she doesn’t know what it is. Inside you there are two bees, she thinks, and a battle between them rages on. But the bees are feeding her, she doesn’t get to choose which one wins. She feels tantalizingly close to a revelation; a bitter apple just out of reach for her starving body.

She learns this spring that she is freer at night; the bees are strictly diurnal, afraid of the dark. Astrid takes her walks then, her body feeling almost as though it belongs to her again, her skin no longer paper-thin but firm and supple. Perhaps she was literally baking in the sun, the moisture leaching from her body, pulled into the sky by the sun’s voracious heat. Her body loosens up as she walks circles in her meadow under the Milky Way, and she decides to do yoga under the moonlight. Her body stretches, naked and yearning, muscles tremoring under the strain. Her muscles, yes, of course, her muscles, not the bees at all, and her skin shivers and prickles in the lingering winter chill. She breathes deeply; in and out, in and out, and she reminds herself that she is Astrid, Bee Girl, and she is alive and well. She picks the early spring berries under the moonlight and sucks on them, drinking the juices. She savors the sweetness, the tang of it reminding her of her body, its pains and pleasures.

It rains in April, not a deluge but an inconstant spitting, at least an hour every day. Astrid loves the rain, the bees hate it. A raindrop could be deadly if you were small enough, wings are useless when wet, and she thinks that must be why they refuse to fly in it. Echo, beautiful Echo, the house cat with the heart of a lion, sits forlornly in the shack, staring through the rain curtain, pupils dilating so all that's left is a pencil-thin line of golden iris. Echo is a warrior; a survivor; a killer; and Astrid both loves and weeps for her. When she cries, the bees swarm her face, licking up her salty tears.

The atmosphere cheers as the sun emerges from the clouds; longer stretches of sunshine mean more time to forage, more time to work. Astrid watches the bees come and go, their movements reminding her of the commuters on the trains, cars stuck in traffic, and still she is one of them. The bees are creating, and Astrid is stagnating.

*        *        *

Kevin clips the spectrometry results with a binder clip, places them in a manila envelope, and keeps them in his briefcase. They are substantial, and growing every day. Astrid had been developing a model using every standardized method to measure the health of each honey bee hive, from average weight to a full nutritional analysis to a virological analysis for bee diseases. It was an impossible endeavour, especially since the advisory committee was incompatible together, but Astrid had dove into it headfirst. She was viciously clever, rapidly becoming an expert in the many facets of honey bee sciences - anatomy and physiology, lifecycle and ecology, behavior, care and management. It was doctorate-level work, and Astrid had only been working for a masters; she didn’t want to get locked in to a single subject for the rest of her life.

Kevin’s stress levels peak the week before finals, as it seems every single student is unprepared; begging for last-minute grade changes and extra credit opportunities. Their questions on what by now should have been basic knowledge, stuff from the first couple chapters even, make his head spin. Where have they been? Where has he been, so oblivious to their bland, confused faces during lectures? Then it is finals week, and he can relax, stare at the ceiling as his students hunch over their blue books. He thinks about Astrid, about how she used to watch the ceiling instead of whoever was talking, even though she was always listening. Kevin had been confused until she told him there were little pips on the ceiling tile, too small for him to make out, and she pretended they were stars when she counted them. She would count the stars while camping, too. She always did it methodically, scientifically: gridding off areas with her fingers, counting the stars in that space, then trying to figure out how many hand squares made up the entire sky. She would catch fireflies and hold them under his nose, close enough for him to make out the sections of its abdomen, watch its flashing code.

Kevin grades the final tests and is pleasantly surprised by the results, the students more or less demonstrating a reasonable understanding of the subjects. He is relieved after submitting the final grades, and decides to take Hugo for a walk around campus. The late spring air is clean and fresh, and Kevin feels lucky that he does not suffer any allergies, that he can appreciate the sweet scent of pollen in the air. It is a peculiar kind of tree sexism that has resulted in millions of people around the world suffering from seasonal allergies. When city planners bulldozed through the natural plant growth and decided to plant foreign, exotic trees in their stead, they picked only the male trees. They did not want fruits to spoil in the streets in the fall, but instead they got massive amounts of pollen dusting every surface in the spring.

It is only noon, and Kevin is meant to return after his lunch hour, but instead he finds himself walking off campus and beyond. Eventually they get to a city park with its own gardens, perennials surrounding a bubbling fountain. He sits on a bench for a while, lets Hugo out of his harness to wander, sniff excitedly through the flowers and grass. It is still early afternoon, and he realizes there is no point in waiting until the weekend to leave; he is doing field work, after all, and it is a long weekend for Memorial Day. He calls Heather on his way home, and by 3:00 pm he is in the passenger seat of her car, his backpacking gear packed neatly in her trunk, directing her to a particular trailhead in the national park.

Chapter 19

In Greek mythology the demigod Aristaeus, Tamer of the Bees, son of Cyrene the huntress and Apollo god of the bow, is credited with the invention of beekeeping, as well as the other agricultural arts necessary for civilization. He learned how to tame the honey bee from Aphrodite’s nymphs  and shared the knowledge with humans, so they could keep hives close for a steady supply of sugar. New bee swarms are said to arise from the carcasses of cattle sacrificed by Aristaeus himself; without his offerings, bees around the world would grow sick and weary, and eventually disappear entirely.

Kevin and Astrid meet up eventually; of course they do, their fates intertwined since before they were born, before even Aristaeus himself was born. Ever since the universe imploded in a big bang, when time itself was created, the destinies of the lovers have been determined, the clock just waiting to catch up to the inevitable. Astrid thinks about fate as she watches the ghostly figure walking blindly through the trees towards her meadow. His skin glows white when patches of the Milky Way peek out from behind the clouds. She had known he was coming since the late afternoon, the bees buzzing in anxious circles around her shack, ignoring the darkness around them, and Astrid recognizes an unexpected fear in herself as well. She knows she will have to tell the truth now, and wonders if it would be better to tell him all at once or in small pieces, working her way up to the ultimate betrayal: ghosting Kevin for the sin of being so beautiful, so lovely, and so very human. It was not the miscarriage, she realizes, that made her want to vanish in thin air; it was the culmination of all the sins of humanity that brought her to that place, so insecure and afraid. The foster families who ignored her or used her or abandoned her; the academics who berated her and pushed her down with their prejudice.

In the darkness she notices a shadow racing ahead of the apparition, and she sees it is a guide dog. Her heart twists when she realizes it isn’t Bruce. Kevin is nearly blind, but the dog is on a direct course for her shack, and he will stumble upon it, upon her, very soon. Hugo is pulling at the harness, clearly on the trail of something. His tongue is lolling out of his mouth, and as Kevin crashes through the undergrowth he starts to feel that he can smell it, too: a lemony-sweet scent, tinged only slightly with darkness and decay.

Then they have stopped, and the clouds in front of the Moon sweep back, and the field is glowing in her radiance. Astrid is in front of him, towering over him like a goddess, her body a work of art. It is her, but it is not her, the edges fuzzy and blurred. Kevin realizes the rushing in his ears isn’t his blood pumping; the entire meadow is buzzing with honey bees. They orbit around them, like planets circling their Sun. Kevin feels as though Astrid is the sun, and him a mere pale flower, stretching out its leaves for her energizing rays. He reaches out for her, and she for him, and their bodies draw together in a magnetic embrace.

The world feels to Astrid like it is spinning too fast around her, but it is just the bees, their bodies revolving, blurring together with the night into a black ink cloud. They melt together, his sweat and her honey mixing on their skin. She feels Kevin’s heart pick up speed as the bees close in on them, blanketing their bodies in a heated wave. When they finally separate, only to look at each other, her body feels too chilled, her bare skin craving his. She doesn't know if she can speak; perhaps her vocal cords have worn away or been replaced by honeycomb, but she doesn’t want to, doesn’t need to speak, because everything she could possibly think to say has already been said, and it has all led up to this exact moment.

Kevin leans forward, upwards slightly because Astrid is taller than him, and they kiss; it is a tiny, shy kiss, like that first time under the stars. Astrid tastes like honey and mint, clovers and lemon balm. Her sun bleached hair falls in dreadlocks around her face, honey colored even in the moonlight, and her skin is obsidian, face both sharp and brittle. Hugo is bouncing around them, Echo is chasing the dog, the bees are chasing each other, and underneath Astrid’s skin Kevin can feel her blood pulsing. To her Kevin feels like he is radiating, not heat but something more powerful, superspectral; the ultraviolet light that guides honey bees, perhaps. She pulls away to look at Kevin’s face, his purple eyes, his white eyelashes, the scar near his temple from an errant baseball when he was 10, and finally she unsticks her throat, and through a film of honey she is able to croak out two words: “You came.”

Chapter 20

They lay side by side in the meadow, bodies parallel, barely touching, electrons jumping between their skin. Echo curls up on Kevin’s chest, grateful for a human not crawling with insects, and Hugo lays between them. Astrid scratches the dog’s ears and asks Kevin about Bruce. His old guide dog had developed cancer in his spleen, which went unnoticed until the tumor began hemorrhaging; by then it was too late, and the only thing left to do was end his pain. When he looks over to Astrid, there are bees clustered on her cheeks, drinking the tears that glisten on her cheeks.

Together they watch the clouds undulating beneath the moonlight, unsettled air currents high up in the outer layers of the atmosphere shifting the condensation back and forth, the building static tingling the air. All of a sudden it is black, the stars and the moon vanished, and then the sky splits open and spills its contents onto the land. They are instantly drenched, and Astrid pulls Kevin into her shelter, the branches of the roof still leaking fat raindrops that seep into his bones. A flash of lightning and the ceiling sparkles, trinkets dangling from the sticks briefly illuminated.

The Hindu goddess of bees is named Bhramari, and she is depicted as being covered head to toe with all species of hymenopterans; not just bees but wasps and hornets and even ants. After the fiery demon Arunasura was blessed with immunity from all two- and four-legged creatures, he ascended from the nether world to the Heavens to capture the moon and the sun. The displaced gods begged Parvati, an incarnation of the Adi Parashakti, to help them. She devised a plan to defeat Arunasura: on the battlefield, Parvati called on all of the six-legged creatures, the insects, to join her body, and they encompassed her, merged with her to create the divine form of Bhramari Devi. They formed an impenetrable exoskeleton around her body, and when she defeated the fire demon Arunasura the insects swarmed over him, tearing into his skin, feasting on his smoking flesh.

Even if you survive a fire, parts of you are still burned away, white ash flakes floating into the heavens carrying with them the pieces of you that the fire consumed. What remains is your foundation: an iron rod, cold and invincible. When Astrid survived the fire that killed her parents, she smoldered internally until she was an empty husk, and the bees who saved her filled her, first with their bodies, then with honeycomb, and the life-giving golden syrup. They provided her with their own life force, their blood, the golden honey that was so precious they would sacrifice themselves to protect it.

The sun is rising in with a resplendent glow as Astrid finishes telling her story of the fire; the one she’d confessed to Sara but not to him. Her voice gradually smooths out as she remembers how to form her mouth around the words, the correct positions for her tongue. Her eyes are the same golden color as the dawn, and they shine like honey. Around them, bees warm their wings before taking off on the endless task of collecting nectar to dry into honey. A single honey bee makes only 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its life, and such a miniscule amount is the result of thousands of repeated trips to different flowers. Most workers die of exhaustion, their wings beaten and torn, after just a few short weeks.

They do not sleep the entire weekend, just walk together around the meadow, talking when they feel like it, silent when they do not. They eat berries together, lips staining red and sticky from the juice. Astrid is horrified to learn of the food shortages, the direct effect of honey bees vanishing. “It might only last a few years,” Kevin tries to assure her, “The other pollinator populations are already starting to grow, fill in the gaps.” Astrid nods, detached, contemplative.

Kevin does not want to leave the meadow when the weekend is over, but his supplies are dwindling, and Astrid insists. “You have a mortal body,” she reminds him, “The bees cannot sustain you.” His departure leaves an empty space in Astrid’s heart, the elastic connection between their souls stretching as the distance between them grows. She prays it does not snap. Kevin reaches the trailhead and sees that Heather is already waiting for him, listening to the radio, and as he settles himself and Hugo in her tiny compact car, she asks, “Did you find what you were looking for?”

Kevin waits a second too long before smiling and answering: “Nope.”

Chapter 21

The ancient Mayans used to harvest honey from the stingless bee Melipona beecheii , called xunan kab in their language, named for its dignified queens. The Mayan word for honey is the same as their word for “world,” and Ah Muzen Kab, the Descending God, is credited for the creation of both. Mayan beekeepers were priests, the sacred rituals of beekeeping and harvesting honey a means of getting closer to god; some of the honey produced by the xunan kab  came from psychotropic flowers, inducing hallucinations in those who ate it. M. beecheii  nearly went extinct after settlers introduced the greedier, higher-yielding African honey bees to the region.

Kevin returns to the meadow the next weekend, and she is absent, and he worries fleetingly that she has left him, or maybe she was never there. He enters the shack with its colorful pieces of detritus dangling from the ceiling, and a glint of silver catches his eye. He pulls on it, snapping the thread that keeps it dangling, to get a closer look. When he holds it up to his face he recognizes it as the ring he gave Astrid on their second anniversary, a tiny silver bee and a single purple amethyst. The shack smells sweet, like honey and flowers and morning dew, and he lays down on a soft woven grass mat to wait for Astrid to return.

He is awoken by Hugo, dancing and excited, and at the edge of the meadow he sees the dark cloud of a swarm approaching. The sight of the honey bees still makes Kevin’s heart race, but he wills his body to remain calm. He has come prepared this weekend, ostensibly on a sampling trip, empty vials and ice packs bulking up his bag. The envelope with Astrid’s data is also tucked in there, although Kevin is not sure if he will take it out. The results from the analytics lab keep trickling in, and the weight of their secret is heavy.

Astrid’s smile as she reaches him is warm, but her eyes are distant, worried, and she immediately asks for more information about the food shortages. “Where are they?”

“Nearly everywhere,” he responds, uncertain. “Everything in the Apis  genus is gone , worldwide. There are other pollinators to fill the niche, but we’re not sure how long that will take.”

“And what will happen until then?”

Kevin shrugs. “Grains self-pollinate, they’ll be fine. Maybe we’ll just have to live off cereal for a while.” She chews on her lips, considering. Kevin thinks about the data in his backpack; the unwritten thesis that was now, just five years later, wholly futile. His skin craves to touch Astrid, feel her warmth, but she flinches at his touch and he stays away.

She leads them to a creek, an odd pair in the woods: Astrid exposed, black skin gleaming, radiant with bees; Kevin’s pale body shrouded in UV protective clothing. They sit with their feet in the water, Hugo splashing around and Echo watching the dog disdainfully. She confesses that she cannot swim, and why she never learned. Kevin recalls hot summer days in long-sleeved swim shirts, coconut fragrance barely concealing the chemical odor of sunscreen. He hated the swim shirts, that overabundance of caution demanded from him just to enjoy the sun. He dreams of going skinny dipping, and that makes Astrid laugh, and he loves the way her eyes twinkle. She promises one night she will find somewhere for him to try it out, when the moon is full. This promise of a future lifts him, soothes him.

It is surprising to Kevin how quickly he is able to forget the bees, their constant presence, always buzzing and humming, crawling over Astrid’s skin. He can smell them, the tiny puffs of pollen in their hairs, their honey crops bloated with flower-scented nectar. Their droning is tenacious, and he feels drowsy, intoxicated. Astrid leans against him, resting on his shoulder, and he tries to ignore the tickle of bees crawling on his skin, too. She tells him about the black bear that had attacked her and the bees last fall, the same one the hiker had reported, and when she talks about them, she uses “we.” Her feet are freezing in the creek, and she misses the sun, so she stands and stretches and suggests they return to the meadow. “What day is it?” she asks, the thought just occurring to her that she has no idea how long she has been here, and together they realize it is early June; the day of the freak snowstorm. The day that everything changed.

As they traipse through the woods, Astrid recalls a date they went on, so many years ago, to a pick-your-own apple orchard. The two-door coupe barely fit them all: Heather drove while Sara chatted in the passenger seat, Bruce crammed in the backseat between Astrid and Kevin. They drove hours through winding mountain roads to get there, and Bruce got car sick twice. When they arrived, they learned they were too late - the entire orchard had been picked clean by eager kids and families over the weekend. They wandered up and down the rows of stunted dwarf apple trees, air thick with the sick-sweet scent of too-ripe apples decaying in the sun. Then, in a single tree in the far corner of the apple, Astrid discovered four perfectly ripe apples, guarded over by a single praying mantis.

The Baganda people of Uganda tell a story of the first man, Kintu, who lived alone with his cow. One day he asked the creator, Ggulu, for his daughter Nambi’s hand in marriage. Ggulu commanded that Kintu must pass a trial of five tests to earn his blessing. In the final test, he was brought to a field and instructed to find Ggulu’s own cow in the large herd. Nambi transformed herself into a bee and whispered into Kintu’s ear to choose the cow whose horn she landed on. Kintu followed the sound of buzzing and the sweet scent of honey to Ggulu’s cow, a tiny honey bee perched on its horn. In addition to a grand and beautiful wedding celebration, Ggulu bestowed to Kintu the gift of agriculture: crops such as bananas, potatoes, beans, and maize, and a single egg-laying hen. With these he would be able to create and sustain human life on Earth.

Kevin is hypnotized by Astrid’s honeyed voice; her ability to weave the disparate stories together like magic. He thinks about Alex, and her particular love for mantids. How she used to trap them to keep as pets for a day, maybe two, before guilt for keeping them inside overwhelmed her and she let them out, crying every time. He thinks if Astrid can be connected to the bees, maybe his sister’s spirit is somewhere, entwined with the mantids.

“I saw the cards you sent mimi, for Alex,” he says suddenly, leaving out the part he wants to say: the part about how she never sent him anything, ever, not even so much as a text message.

“I hope I didn’t upset her.”

“She kept them a secret,” he says. Astrid looks up sharply, and Kevin can’t tell if her eyes are wide with surprise or relief.

Then they are silent again, stepping in sync, hearts beating in sync, bees humming in sync, the Earth itself vibrating to the beat of Astrid and Kevin’s drum.

Before Kevin returns home on Sunday, Astrid assigns him homework. She wants him to find the closest farms to her field; berries or orchards or vegetables. She wants to walk through them, bring the bees to pollinate the crops. “You can’t possibly pollinate all of them,” Kevin says, although he immediately regrets it. Heather is waiting for him again when he reaches the trailhead, and she can see in his face that something in him has changed. He was practically skipping when he entered the woods, and now returns to her trudging, as though dragging a great weight behind him.

Chapter 22

Kevin returns the next weekend with the requested maps and a treat: a packet of sugary, fruity gummy bears, Astrid's favorite candy. She eats them slowly, sucking on the colorful shapes until the gelatin dissolves. In the sun she hunches over the map, planning out a walking path to visit as many farms as possible.

"That will take all summer," Kevin says lightly, the trail a looping mess traversing half the state.

"I know."

Kevin plays with a mantis crawling around the branches that make up Astrid’s shack, and tells her about Alex’s old fantasy world, Heland, that she created in 4th grade. She had named it that because a teacher insisted that hell was a bad word and she wasn’t allowed to use it. Alex informed her it was named after Hel, the Norse goddess of the underworld, and that the teacher was violating her rights to religious freedom.

“She really said that?” Astrid laughs, picturing a shy young Kevin trying to stand bravely next to his boisterous and precocious sister.

“She did, indeed. She even staged a protest on the playground.” Alex had been so honorable, so determined to make the world more fair. Where Kevin’s kindness wasn’t enough, Alex came in burning with righteous anger. When they started 2nd grade together, Kevin the new kid, she beat up his bullies; then she taught him how to fight back for himself. “The Egyptian Book of the Dead ,” he remembers suddenly, “calls the praying mantis a bird-fly. It leads the souls of the dead to the underworld.” Alex had been in love with Egyptian culture, insisting they learn hieroglyphs the summer before she died.

“Honey bees came from the tears of Ra,” Astrid responds, referring to the sun god. “They were thought to messengers from the gods.”

“What do you think these ones are saying?” The bees are slow in this heat, bouncing lazily from one flower to another. Astrid isn’t sure: are the bees a message for her, or is she a messenger for the bees?

“I thought the bees were going to save me forever,” she says finally. “Then they almost killed me.”

Kevin looks up, alarmed. “When?”

“It was the last time I went sampling. They stung me around the ankle, it felt like over a hundred times.”

“Is that why you left?”
        “Sort of.” She wouldn’t offer him more; not yet.

Astrid walks Kevin and Hugo to the trail, as far as she is willing to go. She is cradling Echo as she walks, and when they arrive at the trail, she asks Kevin to take her home with him. “I’m worried she’s getting too feral,” she offers as explanation. The cat obligingly follows them along the trail, at least 4 miles to the trailhead. It is Sara waiting for him this time, and she raises an eyebrow when she sees the new passenger.

“Just a stray,” Kevin says. “Didn’t want her to get hurt.” Echo sleeps high up on his kitchen cabinets, and she races out the door when he opens it for Hugo, chases the dog around the yard. At work, Kevin prepares for the summer intensive courses that cram a semester’s worth of material into a few short weeks. He joins graduate students in the agricultural fields, sweeps huge nets back and forth through the rows of crops, identifies every bug caught in the net. The populations of native pollinators are 75% greater than this time last year, and he records the data in neatly organized tables, tiny pieces of an ecological puzzle spanning miles.

Kevin returns to the meadow the next weekend to find it empty. He camps out under the stars he cannot see, Hugo burrowed deep inside his sleeping bag. He misses Astrid’s warmth, her bees and their natural thermostats. Asian honey bees used to have a predator, the Japanese hornet, that was immune to their venom. If their hive was invaded, they would blanket themselves over the hornet and vibrate their wings to generate enough heat to cook their enemy. Kevin wonders if the Japanese hornet will die without the honey bees to feast on. Before he leaves the meadow he ties a couple of Jolly Rangers to the ceiling of Astrid’s shack, artificial dyes gleaming in the thin streams of sunlight.

Astrid walks in a trance. She has relinquished her body to the bees, and her feet move automatically towards whatever fragrant flowers they can find. She tries to follow her map, roughly, guiding the bees with the promise of flowers, but they tire easily as she walks. When they find an orchard, they grow fat and happy on seemingly endless supplies of nectar, and, in return, they drop clouds of fresh pollen on every flower they land on, but the windfall does not last nearly long enough, and the bees tire of the same old fruit trees.

Some bees are specialized for the plants they pollinate. Alfalfa flowers have a pollen trap: a thick, spring-loaded petal that triggers when a bee lands, flipping forward and smacking the bee on the head. The trap serves two purposes: dusting the bee with pollen, and scaring it away before it takes more than its share of nectar. Producing nectar requires energy and resources, and plants do not want to make any more than necessary, even as they have a near unlimited source of energy from the sun. The native Alfalfa leafcutter bee adapted a thicker exoskeleton around its head like a helmet, and can ignore the hits and continue to pollinate the plant. Honey bees, on the other hand, learned to avoid the trap entirely by chewing through the side of the flower, thus preventing any pollination at all from taking place. Other flowers, such as tomatoes and blueberries, require sonication: heavy bumblebees that vibrate their wings fast enough to shake the pollen loose from its tight bonds, which honey bees cannot do. Then there are the thousands of species of other insects, and even vertebrates like birds and bats, that have adapted to eat from a particular species of flower, which has adapted to attract that particular species of animal. Honey bees will drink the nectar from nearly any flower, but they demand variety.

Astrid walks naked through cultivated fields, listening and smelling for the farmers, their stench of ammonia and sweat and diesel fuel, but she does not consider security or trail cameras. Kevin finds a video online titled “Crazy black lady walks naked through the woods.” The grainy footage of Astrid walking through some guy’s peach orchard is fortunately too dark to see any details; too blurred by the cloud of bees concealing her body.

Chapter 23

Kevin returns to the field every weekend, but it isn’t until mid-July that he will finally meet up with Astrid. Occasionally he arrives to find the candy he left missing, a new trinket in its place: silver spoon, scorched on the bottom; a tiny green plastic frog; the iridescent blue wing of a butterfly. One night Astrid stops by the shack to find a single can of strawberry soda, her favorite. She guzzles it quickly, and the fizzing sweetness thrills her. She ties the can to the ceiling in thanks.

She walks through the hot summer afternoons and those chilling evening storms, the hairs on the back of her neck tingling from electricity in the atmosphere. She ducks under boulders for shelter when heavy chunks of hail are thrown violently from the foreboding clouds, wind pummeling her from every direction, bees buzzing angrily inside her. Then it is quiet again, and she resumes walking. She doesn't know what difference she is making, if any, dragging the bees around the state to pollinate the crops. She is slow and finite; she is consuming too much energy, and even with the boosted nectar supply the orchards provide, the bees worry there will not be enough honey for winter. Let them worry , she thinks, nothing is ever good enough for them anyway . Even as she thinks it, she knows it is not fair.

Their paths cross again during another long weekend, a holiday with fireworks and hotdogs, too many people deciding at the same time to crowd the national parks. Astrid feels the people creeping closer: backpackers looking to rough it, families with toddlers that would make a perfect snack for a bear, teenagers seeking an isolated spot to fuck. Astrid and Kevin hide in her hut until night falls, then she leads him away. He follows her through the dark, trusts her to guide him on rough surfaces, and they arrive at a small, clear pool, moonlight reflecting off its surface. Hugo bounds past them and crashes into the water with an enormous splash. Bats fly overhead, squeaking, chirping, swooping to snatch up insects. There are no bees tonight, just Astrid, and she seems smaller, vacant. Kevin shyly strips behind a tree, and Astrid peeks through her fingers, giggling like a schoolgirl, as he runs through the cool air and jumps into the water.

The water is cold from the run-off of melted snow in the higher mountains, and Kevin swims aimlessly in wide circles to keep his blood flowing. Astrid sits on a rock, just above the water, and trails her fingers along the mirrored water for a while, watching him swim in the moonlight. Then she slides her body into the freezing pond, the water chest high with her toes buried in the mud. He shows her how to move her arms like paddles, to kick her feet, and before they grow numb with hypothermia she can do a clumsy front crawl.

They pull themselves out of the water with stiff limbs and lay shivering together, and as a show of their love for her the bees brave the night’s darkness to find them, to blanket them in their tiny, warm bodies. They lay intertwined and in the darkness Astrid corrects another lie she had told him: how Mr. Jackson made her believe no one would ever love her, why she ran away to live in the woods at nine years old. She uses the word rape and it hisses, oil mixing with water on a hot pan.

When the sun peaks over the horizon, they hear too late the raucous sounds of college students on holiday, and Kevin scrambles to gather his clothing before they arrive. Astrid darts into the trees and immediately disappears in the shadows, but he is a beacon; and then Hugo is barking, and a dozen fraternity boys crash through the undergrowth to reach the pond.

“Jesus fuck,” one of them shouts upon seeing Kevin. He is shocked by the albino’s paleness, the translucency of his skin, hair the same bright white as the paint on his walls in his dorm room.

“Excuse me,” he says, trying to squeeze through them, but they form a wall.

“No way,” another one says, “What’s a creepy guy like you doing out here anyway?”

“He looks like a serial killer,” one of them says, and Kevin regrets his meekness, his long-suffering inability to stand up for himself. Then they are shouting as bees swoop in, stinging and chasing the young men away.

Kevin wanders through the trees until Astrid is in front of him, dangling upside down from the lower branches of a tree like a honey bee swarm. Bees spiral around her dangling dreadlocks, an impish smile on her face. She jumps down, landing on her feet, and then her arms are around Kevin’s neck; then they are kissing; then they are spinning; then they are invincible.

Chapter 23

The ancient Hittite people in the Anatolian peninsula told a story of the god of agriculture, Telipinu, whose enraged disappearance resulted in plants refusing to grow, cattle refusing to reproduce, mothers refusing to care for their young. Without his presence the once fertile land dried up into a desert, and everyone suffered. The gods desperately sought Telipinu to end the scarcity, but could not find him. Eventually, the mother goddess Ḫannaḫanna sent out a bee to find him, and when she did, she fortified him by stinging his hands and feet, and rubbing wax over his body. A mortal priest then used honey and smoke to banish the god’s anger to the Underworld, and Telipinu was able to return to his house and understand the importance of his land. The crops returned, and the cattle birthed their babies, and mothers began to care for their children again, and the famine ended.

Astrid is absent the rest of the summer, but Kevin can get a rough estimation on her whereabouts just tracking rumors from farmers. Select areas in the state report a substantial increase in immature fruits compared to last year, while the rest of the country is stuck on a slow incline. It is a minute addition, nearly insignificant to the whole, but enough to ease the general public’s concerns.

The season grows quickly colder, earlier than most years, and the sky is daily blanketed in heavy grey clouds. It is on the autumnal equinox that Kevin and Astrid are reunited, and he is concerned to see her looking so faded, worn, diminished. The ever-present nebulous cloud of bees that surrounds her seems smaller; she is thin, shivering. She describes her travels, that autonomic walking, the struggle to avoid being seen, but laughs when he tells her about the video of her online. “I need to train the bees to cover up security cameras,” she says, her flippance concealing a deeper anxiety.

She presents to Kevin a gift of berries and two plump, sweet peaches that they eat together, Kevin imitating her slow method of savoring the fruits. She also hands him two cards. An orchid mantis, painted in watered down blackberry juice, decorates the first, intended for Heather and Alex. The second is a painting of the Milky Way: nebulae scratched into a thick coat of black charcoal, tinted a rainbow of colors, and tiny yellow flowers stuck to the paper as twinkling stars that bleed out of the sky and into the landscape as fireflies.

That night the rain comes down in icy pellets, stinging Kevin’s skin like hundreds of tiny sweat bees. Astrid is shivering and when he holds her she feels fragile, skeletal. Her body feels empty and neglected, the buzzing muted, buried too deep. Astrid had forgotten the cold, and losing the warmth of the bees is a shock to both her body and her mind. She thinks she may have betrayed them by letting another human in their life, and maybe that is why they attacked her so viciously that day she found out she was pregnant. Or maybe she betrayed them by forgetting that she is them; that they are We. She has dragged them around the state to pollinate all of the crops because she cannot let go of her humanity, and she greedily takes advantage of the bees’ generosity.

She tells Kevin that night of a Cherokee legend that explains how the honey bee got its stinger. The people of the Earth asked their Creator for something sweet, and the Creator sent a Bee, but the Bee had no stinger. The Bee found a tree to build her hive and grow her family, and when the people discovered her, she gladly shared the honey with them, for she was a generous Bee and had more than enough to feed her family. The people devoured the sugary syrup greedily, and demanded more, but the Bee needed the rest of the honey to survive the winter and refused. Enraged, the people tore into her hive and stole the honeycomb. The Bee was furious and asked the Creator for help, and the Creator told her to find a briar bush. When the Bee ate the briars, they transformed into a stinger, and when the people returned the next day to demand more honey she stung them, and they fled, covered in welts.

“Do you think the bees are punishing you?” Kevin runs his fingers along her back, vertebrae too prominent through her skin, which feels as fragile as birch bark.

“I think I’ve disappointed them.” Astrid sits up, her chest feeling tight. She does not know what the bees want from her, they just obsess over the honey, the pollen, the larvae; clean, build, defend; lay. Her life is consumed by this hive-minded obsession, and she has no choice but to participate because it is inside of her. The hive mind is her own.

Kevin sits up, too, looks over at his birthday cards. “This is the first time I’ve celebrated my birthday since I was 12,” he reflects.

“What did you do for your 12th birthday?”

“We had a picnic.” His eyes are closed, his face so peaceful she has to watch his chest to confirm he is breathing. He continues, “We had ice cream cake, and then Alex and I went to the pond to catch crawdads. She had me distracted while mum left to pick up Bruce.” Kevin flinches when a bee lands on his arm; he has to resist the urge to squash it.

“He was a good dog.” As soon as she says it, Hugo looks up, eyes sleepy, and they laugh deliriously. It is late and they are exhausted, and they stretch out perpendicular, Astrid’s head resting on Kevin’s stomach, and they fall asleep listening to the dying hum of Astrid’s bees.

Chapter 24

After the cold front finally passes, the month warms, offering a second chance to forage before the first frost. Astrid is able to relax in the sun and the bees cheer as their honey stores grow more secure.

Kevin is busy with the new semester: new students, new faculty, new drama and conflicts, new research projects to find funding for. He feels overworked and underappreciated, and looks forward to the evenings. He spends them laying on the floor of his bedroom, Hugo at his feet, Echo curled around his head, daydreaming. He visits his moms every week, and they are concerned for him. When Heather finally confronts him in her attic he is relieved, and he finds himself pouring his emotions out to her. He tells her about his investigations into the honey bee disappearance; its astounding coincidences; the realization that Astrid is at the center of it all. He does not mention the bees, or where exactly he has been meeting up with Astrid, but Heather quickly figures the second part out.

“Are you happy you’ve found her again?”

He chews on his lip, hesitating before answering. “Do you know about the bee orchid?” he asks, and when she shakes her head he continues, “It’s a flower that evolved to look like a specific female long-horned bee. It tricks the males into trying to mate with it, then they get covered in its pollen.” The insect and flower evolutionary arms race is fascinating to watch: plants evolve poisons, insects evolve immunity; plants evolve thicker bark, insects evolve needled mouthparts that can pierce between the cracks. Many insects evolved to look like plants, as camouflage for hunting or hiding. Kevin suddenly remembers the orchid mantis on the birthday card Astrid had painted for Alex and ducks out, assuring her he’ll be back.

He returns with the painting and hands it to his mimi, watches her face, first confused, then a small, sad smile emerges. “I missed her last year. I thought maybe she finally let go.”

“She’s changed,” Kevin says. She’s like the bee orchid: the image of the bee, but not the bee itself. The bee is extinct, has been for thousands of years, and the flowers toiled on, self-pollination preventing them from mixing genes and evolving away from the bee. The only thing left of the bee is the flower’s memory of it.

The next time Kevin returns to the meadow, Astrid looks healthier, less fragile. Her skin is brighter again; obsidian, not dull like charcoal. The cloud around her hums contentedly. He has brought her gifts: it is Halloween, and he brings a pumpkin bucket with her favorite candies. The plastic is cheap and cheesy, and Astrid loves it; she is elated, euphoric. They eat the candy together next to the pond. It is smaller now, barely waist deep, and it stinks of sulphur. She tells Kevin about Beckett, the Halloween baby whom she had loved so dearly, and the mother who had tossed her aside so casually, accused her of trying to kill the baby when all she was doing was trying to help. She is not crying but Kevin is, his heart broken for her.

The weather turns again just before Thanksgiving, and the weekend before there is a blizzard warning for the mountains and the foothills. Kevin begs Astrid to come home with him, but she refuses; she insists she will be fine, that she has already survived one winter, but as the snow builds so too does Kevin’s dread, weighing heavily on his chest. Drifts pile up in his backyard and Echo refuses to touch it, glaring at the ice puddles left by Hugo’s outside frolicking. The roads are closed for three days as the plows work to clear the massive drifts; then black ice coats them for the next three weeks, each melted layer refreezing in the night. The trailhead is inaccessible and Kevin despairs, barely able to work, teach, function. He has no way of knowing if Astrid is surviving; so many hives do not, they succumb to the cold, or starvation, or their hives get torn apart by animals, too sluggish in the cold to fight back. The Varroa destructor mite tucks itself away in the scales of the bees' abdomens, feeding on their hemolymph, weakening them and spreading diseases. The mites multiply easily in the close quarters, and hives are quickly overrun. A winter survival rate of more than 50% is unusual; millennia of experience has beekeeping down to a science, and even experts can only keep around 80% alive during the winter.

He finally gets a window of warm weather, the snow melting enough to make the trail manageable with spikes. He arrives to the meadow and Astrid is walking barefoot around the meadow, the wet snow still ankle deep, and when she sees Kevin all bundled up in a parka and thermals, waterproof ski pants and wool socks tucked into thickly lined boots, she shouts a surprised laugh, runs to him and tackles him, and Kevin has a flashback to playing ultimate frisbee with Alex as kids, full contact, because "football isn't rough enough."

As they trudge through the snow he tells Astrid about the time he got a concussion. Alex tackled him one day and his head slammed on the ground, hard, dark spots bubbling in his vision, ears ringing. Then a white light exploded, blinding, encompassing. He was unconscious for less than 30 seconds, and woke up to Alex's warm touch, her voice distant, telling him not to move. She had called 911, accompanied him in the ambulance, and Dr. Sara Fisher was called down to the ER from the maternity ward because her children were there. When she got to his room his back was turned to her, the doctor stitching his scalp shut where it split open on a stone. Alex was on the chair next to him, holding his hand and talking about wanting to be an EMT. Kevin had a concussion and had to stay at the hospital for the night; soon Heather arrived, fussed over Kevin and Alex and chatted with the doctors and nurses, and finally she took Alex home, the girl exhausted. Finally alone with Kevin, Sara wrapped herself up in a thin hospital blanket and read to him from The Hobbit . Kevin dozed on and off, never sure if the flickering lights in his vision were fireflies, or indicator lights on the machines, or a dream.

"I wish I had been as brave as she had when I had to do it," he finishes, voice sorrowful. He had been quick to react, they told him, he'd done everything right, but Kevin felt like he'd been moving through sludge, too thick and slow. When Alex yelped and fell to the grass, he raced over and inspected her foot. The stinger was still there, venom sac still attached. Residual nerve impulses in the venom sac keep it pumping the venom in, so he grabbed a leaf and scraped the stinger out. As he called 911 Alex was breathing heavily, then gasping, wheezing, her foot already puffy and warm, a red spot growing around the hole from the stinger. The ambulance arrived within minutes but it was already too late, the epinephrine and oxygen and electrical paddles unable to call back back the Egyptian mantis, Melissa's bees, the xunan kab ; whoever had been responsible for shuffling Alex's soul to the afterlife.

The snow is wet and Kevin has to strip out of his soaked clothes. He hangs them to dry on branches in the sun. Astrid's warmth is enough to fill the shack, and she watches him speak, hears the things he is not saying: how he blames himself entirely, for everything. He had asked Alex to play outside, let her choose soccer, despite the fact that they were both barefoot. Even where she was running when she stepped on the bee was his fault. If his kick had been true, she never would have died; if he hadn't needed the shade, they would have played somewhere else in the yard. Everything short of placing the bee under Alex's bare foot was Kevin's fault, and he has never forgiven himself for it.

Chapter 25

It is unlikely Kevin will see Astrid again before Christmas, so he gives her his present early: the thick folder with all of her sampling results, finally fully processed. She accepts them gracefully and that night, far from the bees, she breaks with her pyrophobia, and together they light the pages on fire one by one, fat tears dropping onto the papers still clutched in her hands.

Christmas passes in another flurry of snow, and as the New Year bleeds into February, the temperatures refuse to creep above freezing, and Astrid experiences the familiar feeling of fading. It is unmistakably clear to her that they are dying; her blood feels mixed with ash, a toxic sludge oozing through her heart. It is too cold, the bees too weak to be effective heaters. They shrink their cluster as tight as they can, and Astrid’s fingers turn blue, then black, as the water inside her cells crystalizes and bursts. She is empty, starving, dissolving. She wonders if the bees will carry her soul to the afterlife, if there even is an afterlife. She imagines dissolving into a million little bees, each one of them a part of her, a part of her in each of them, and flying off into the sky, past the atmosphere, the moon, the planets, and straight into the sun.

Kevin is anxious in the new semester; distracted, evasive. Hugo paces in circles around the house, and Echo has been in hiding. His classes are trifling, his lectures half-hearted, and eventually he is called in for a meeting with the department head, where he promises to put more effort in his lessons. The polar days drag on, record snowfall this winter of all winters, and Astrid is dying. He feels it as though a part of himself is dying, and he loathes himself for not saving her, not insisting she come home with him last time, then not visiting her, prevented from even coming near her by the snow packed roads. In mid-March he can’t wait anymore; he finds some students driving to a ski resort for the weekend, and in exchange for a twenty they drop him off at the trailhead. He sinks down to his knees with each step, and Hugo quickly wears himself out bounding through the chest-deep snow. The snow blanketed landscape is unfamiliar and Kevin doesn’t know how to get to the meadow, worries he’s walked past it. Then Hugo is sniffing the air, spinning in circles; he’s picked up a trail, and they chase after it.

Astrid is dimly aware of the dog licking her face, then Kevin bowed over her, feeling for her pulse, breath, detecting no signs of either. Her heart is beating too softly, too slowly for him to detect. She feels distant and vacant, like she is reading about herself in a book. She tries to lift a hand, grab his wrist, touch his knee, something, but she is too heavy, too frozen on the ground.

Kevin covers her body with his jacket, thinking she is lost, no bees crawling around as he piles dry sticks in the entrance of the shelter for a campfire. He cannot feel the red glow from the tiny flames, cannot feel anything, his entire body numb. Hugo is curled up with Astrid’s body and if it weren’t for him Kevin wonders if he would bury the fire before he went to sleep; let the snow blanket them both. Astrid feels the heat from the flames, the warmth from the dog curled up with her, and eventually the sun's rays that peek through the branches, and her skin warms enough to revive her. She slowly becomes more aware of her body, her fingers and toes tingling as though she has been stung by a thousand bees, and she thinks maybe she has, that now she is fortified like Telipinu. She moves closer to Hugo’s warmth and the dog jumps, barks, and then Kevin is awake and holding her, incredulous. He builds up the flames to a proper campfire and Astrid ignores the nervous fluttering in her stomach, unsure if it is hers or the bees. They crawl together into Kevin’s sleeping bag, and Astrid slowly thaws in his embrace. As her body warms, the tight cluster of bees within her begins to relax, and their soft buzzing lulls them both to sleep.

In the afternoon Astrid pulls on Kevin’s thermal shirt and snow pants and the trio trek through the snow. She is weak and leans heavily on him, and when she collapses in the snow he abandons his camping supplies so he can carry her on his back, her body so very light.

Chapter 26

Humans have been stealing from bees for at least as long as they’ve been making tools. A certain species of bird, the honeyguide, has been singing to hunter-gatherers for almost 2 million years, guiding them to the sweet comb in exchange for the protein-rich larvae they left behind. Cave drawings in Spain from 8,000 years ago depict a human high up a tree with a basket to collect honey, tiny black bees flying around the figure. A jar of honey was found in a 3,000 year old tomb in Egypt, sealed with wax and unspoiled. For centuries, the Gurung people of Nepal have been climbing 200-foot rope ladders to reach giant honey combs built by the largest honey bee in the world, Apis laboriosa . The honey hunters use long poles to knock the giant comb into baskets; they have to ignore the stings, because one wrong move and they will fall to their death. Everything a bee produces has been used in some facet of traditional medicine: honey, pollen, propolis, beeswax, even the royal jelly that fattens up queen bees is packaged and sold commercially. The Vikings’ treasured mead was made from fermented honey, and in medieval Germany the tradesman known as Zeitler  developed a method of semi-domesticating honey bees in hollowed-out tree trunks to collect enough honey to trade and sell. Most early beekeeping methods involved destroying the entire hive to harvest its honey, until Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth invented the modern framed hive in 1851. With boxes and frames, beekeepers can remove the honey without destroying too much comb, and divide up the boxes based on their purpose: the queen stays in the lower chambers, and plastic mesh sheets keep her from moving upward and laying eggs in the honey frames.

8,000 years or more of humans stealing from honey bees, not just honey bees but all bees, using their innate industriousness to feed an increasing demand for bigger crops, better yield; then turning around killing them in equal amounts with pesticides intended for other insects. Now the honey bees have vanished, and the humans are scrambling to replace them.

Dr. Sara Fisher drives away from the trailhead where Kevin had emerged, hunched over under the weight of a body - Astrid’s body, but too light, she realizes, as she helps her son guide the woman into the back seat. “She’s alive,” he says, answering her querying look. “It’s hypothermia.” He claims she fell through some ice and he’d had to drag her out. He seats himself next to her in the back, and Hugo, wet and freezing, curls up in the front seat. Sara intends to head to the hospital, but Astrid is awake by the time they have left the wilderness, and she shakes her head violently at the idea.

“At least let me take you to our place,” she says. At least there she can monitor her. Astrid agrees mutely, numbly, preoccupied. She sleeps fitfully for over 24 hours, piled under blankets in Alex’s too-soft bed, feverish and hallucinating. She thinks she sees bees flying around the room, and every time she stumbles to the window she finds it open, no matter how many times she closes it. She swats at the bees and her hands pass right through them. Sara comes in regularly to check her temperature, offers her sips of something sugary to wash down the sticky sweet Tylenol she insists Astrid take to lower her fever. Astrid wants to ask if she sees the bees, too, but her tongue feels glued to her mouth, her throat stuck shut.

Finally, Astrid wakes, and stays awake, and Sara helps her sit up in the bed, weak muscles straining beneath her skin. “What have you done to yourself?” she asks, but Astrid remains silent, staring resolutely out the window until Sara leaves the room. She is scanning the trees outside, looking hopefully for a dark swarm of bees, but the branches are bare. Sara returns with a bowl of fruit, which Kevin had suggested, his voice so haggard, strained with concern. Sara is furious with Kevin for whatever part he played in this, and refuses to allow him to see her.

A short time later Heather enters the room, Alex’s room, to see the woman who is not her daughter curled up silently in her daughter’s bed. Heather opens the window all the way, the air outside chilly and humid, and she lights a joint, inhaling deeply before passing it to Astrid. She holds it awkwardly, her eyes crossing as she inhales, watching the cherry glow. They pass it back and forth until it is just a roach, and Astrid carefully pinches the flame out, making certain the entire thing is extinguished. Heather suggests a bath, and Astrid obediently follows her into the bathroom, holds her hand as she climbs unsteadily into the tub filled with warm, steaming water. She lays back as Heather washes her dreadlocks, scrubbing her scalp then rinsing it with a cup like she is a child. The soaps are all natural, no toxic chemical smells to mask, and Astrid breathes their scent deeply, eyes closed, and imagines she is in her meadow. Then Heather is helping her stand, wrapping her up in a fluffy bathrobe, gently patting her dreads dry, guiding her back to Alex’s bed, tucking her in under the sheets.

It is dark when she opens her eyes again, only a dim orange glow from the streetlight illuminating the trees outside. She stands to look out the window, breathing in the fresh air, and in its scent she smells her bees. She leaves the room and pads barefoot down the hall, creaking open Kevin’s door and quickly ducking in, closing it slowly with a muted click. He is already waiting for her, holding out his blanket for her to lay next to him, and for the first time in a long time she sleeps dreamlessly.

*        *        *

She wakes up before Kevin does, before even the sun has lightened the sky, and she makes her way into the kitchen. Sara is already there, flipping pancakes on the griddle and if it weren’t for the new wrinkles around her eyes Astrid would think she had gone back in time. She sits mutely at the breakfast island, watching Sara as she moves fluidly around the kitchen.

Astrid looks ravenous, so Sara plucks two of the pancakes off the finished stack and puts them in a plate in front of her, along with a glass of orange juice. She pours a comical amount of syrup on them, like a child, and lets each bite disintegrate in her mouth before swallowing. She holds the glass of orange juice in both hands and drinks deeply, savoring its sweet tang. She puts the glass down and glances up to see Sara watching her intently. “You disappeared yesterday,” she says, voice creaking like a rusty gear.

“I was called into the hospital. One of my patients had a miscarriage,” Sara responds.

Astrid looks up in alarm. “Was it her fault?”

Sara, shocked by the question, insists, “Of course not, honey.” The odds against carrying a pregnancy to full term, everything aligning perfectly to create an actual, living person are astronomically small. There are too many places for something to go wrong: an error in meiosis, an extra chromosome in the wrong place, or just the wrong timing entirely, and so many pregnancies are lost before the woman even realizes she is pregnant.

Astrid is staring at her, speechless, tears filling her wide eyes, and suddenly Sara understands. “How far along were you?” she asks.

“12 weeks.” Astrid recalls riding to the hospital in a taxi, because she didn’t want to call an ambulance to her dorm room, a towel wedged between her legs so she wouldn’t stain the seats. She thought she was dying, there was so much blood. Before the ultrasound, one of the nurses asked how far along she was, but she couldn’t answer; she rarely got her period, and it was impossible to predict. The tiny shape on the grainy black and white screen was unnaturally still, not even a flutter of a heart beat, and Astrid watched the technician move the wand through the cold gel on her stomach, his face a cool, passive mask as he clicked the mouse with his other hand, taking measurements, then left her alone with the promise of a doctor being in soon. She had been pregnant for nearly 3 months without even realizing it, her body neglecting the life inside her without ever giving her the option to choose. “She said it was my fault,” she finishes, “I shouldn’t have risked it to work with bees.”

Sara has to suppress her outrage; she wants to know the hospital, the name of the doctor who had the gall to tell a mourning young woman that she had been responsible for her own loss, but she holds her tongue. Astrid looks so small, so fragile, like a breath of wind might take her away, and when Sara reaches out to hug her, she melts into her arms.

Chapter 27

Astrid sits in the Fishers’ backyard, motionless even as she hears the door behind her open and Hugo bounding into the grass. Her face is turned to the sun, eyes closed, content, and when Kevin sits beside her she leans into him, rests her head on his shoulder. “Look,” she whispers, eyes still closed, pointing at a tree nearby. Kevin squints at the tree, barely making out the silhouette of a tiny black mass moving fluidly along one of the branches. Swarming bees flow like liquid, almost dripping off the branch.

“Yours?” he asks, and Astrid nods. She has been staying with his parents for a week now, sitting in the garden during the day, then joining Heather in her studio after sunset, often until the early morning hours. Kevin has not seen her since the day after rescuing her; the university is consuming every minute of his time as the spring semester enters its last month, and with no good way to commute from this house he has been alone in his own home, feeling isolated, detached. He is relieved for spring break, and to see Astrid again, her skin looking less thin, her face less wan. She smells like flowers again, with just a hint of sweet honey.

“It’s my birthday,” she says after a moment.

“I know, I got you something.” Her eyes open, find his face with its tiny hint of a smirk. His gift for her is an old film camera, with detachable lenses gleaming in the sun, and Astrid turns it over in her hands. She has never used one before, but she finds its weight satisfying, the metal casing cold in her hands. She loads the film in it clumsily, then holds it up to her face, snapping a picture of Kevin without even checking the settings.

That first picture ends up so white and overexposed that she has to pay extra to convince the guy at the camera store to print it. The photographic paper feels strange under her fingers as she traces them over Kevin’s washed out features, just the barest shadows outlining his eyes, his nostrils. She learns from a book about photography Heather has lent her: exposure times and apertures, film speed and grain, focal lengths and depths of field. She reads that the scale to the side of the viewfinder is a light sensor, and when she sticks a button battery into the camera the aperture needle swings up and down, depending on the amount of light available. She walks around outside, feet bare, too hot under clothes that feel foreign on her skin. Everywhere she goes, the bees follow; yet they hold back, remain high in the trees. They will not come to her, and perhaps they are not ready; or else it is she who is not ready, and they know it.

She takes pictures of everything: a faded telephone pole, Hugo in his guide-dog harness, her own feet. From the kitchen one day she spies Heather and Sara, sitting together on their couch, half empty glasses of wine between them on the coffee table. Their heads are bowed together, watching something on Netflix, and Astrid surreptitiously snaps a photo of them. They have not asked her what her plans are or when she is going to move out of Alex’s room, and she is grateful for their unquestioning warmth.

Kevin, too, respects her space, and she loves him for it, even as she avoids being alone with him. She is tired of being the victim: Dr. Evan and his sexual assault, Dr. Allen and his bigotry, herself and her stubbornness and that terrible winter. In some cultures, if you save someone’s life, they owe you; in others, you are forever beholden to them. The dynamic unsettles her, makes her feel trapped, or like she is trapping him. It is the same dynamic she had with the bees, and then she betrayed them; forced them to overwork themselves, starve themselves, nearly let them die. She does not know if they will ever forgive her, or if she will ever forgive herself.

Astrid learns that her old bosses, Matt and Sam, had packed up her things, saving them before her landlord evicted her. They are in storage somewhere, but Astrid does not want them; she feels no attachment to her old flat and its things, her old life. It feels like they belonged to someone else entirely. She helps them unload the boxes filled with books at a charity donation center. When she sees Walden  at the top of one box, she pulls it out, thumbs through the pages, and finds the postcards Heather sent her. She decides to keep that book. She thinks she might want to reread it sometime, when the ghost of the past winter fades.

In Heather’s attic, she sits by the window, open to let smoke out and the cool breeze in. Her head buzzes pleasantly from the pot, and she watches the night sky for fireflies. It is too cold at night for them, she knows, but their absence fills her with longing and need. She misses the bees, and her little shack, the heavy scent of the flowers in her meadow. She misses watching thunderstorms, raw and exposed, the bees tremoring around her in fear. The storms in the suburbs feel too muted, weakened by the closely spaced houses and tall, privacy fencing. Suburban thunderstorms are cursed for their own dangers: tree limbs on cars or through roofs, outdoor furniture blown around the yard. Everything is so cheap, so temporary and replaceable. No loss is a real loss, manufactured goods representing the impermanence of the universe on a microscopic scale.

A sharp screech rings out in the attic behind her and Astrid jumps up, spinning around. Heather is backing away from her canvas; she’s knocked over her water, thickly tinted from all of the colors she’s rinsed from her brushes. It spreads on the hardwood floor, soaking into one of her socks, but Heather doesn’t notice, eyes fixed on the canvas in front of her. “There’s a bee,” she gasps, and Astrid bolts across the room. The bee is crawling around a half-finished painting, purple paint flecks stuck to its wings. She cups her hands around it and scoops it up, carries it carefully back to the window. Heather breathes out a sigh of relief, then begins laughing. “I’m so sorry, I’m being ridiculous,” she giggles, feeling hysterical. “There aren’t even any honey bees left.” Astrid nods, hiding a half smile, and the honey bee in her hands buzzes its wings to dry them briefly before flying off.

Chapter 28

In late spring, they leave Hugo and Echo with Kevin’s parents, and together they return to the meadow. They plan on staying through the solstice, and then Kevin is taking a sabbatical for the rest of the summer. They don’t want to keep Hugo from his memory-foam dog bed, or Echo from her air-conditioned sun windows, for too long. Everything is as it was before, and he knows the place by heart. The bees are trailing Astrid, and they are happy, and she is light, and the meadow welcomes her with its familiar fragrance, that glowing warmth. The shack is leaning, rotting; the earth reclaiming materials. Astrid takes a picture before entering the pile of branches that was her home for almost 2 years. Her trinkets, those little bits of trash, are still there, and she photographs these, too, sparkling in the sunlight. Then they pull them all down; anything unnatural is dumped into a bag to be thrown away. Kevin is in awe of her: she thinks of everything, everyone around her. Take only pictures, leave only footprints, taken so very literally. The bees are thrilled for the meadow; they are familiar with the landscape, and they quickly find the sweetest flowers.

They have forgiven her, she thinks, but there is nothing to forgive; bees are generous, humble workers, they hold no grudges. Astrid wonders how many life cycles of bees have gone through her since they almost died in March. Two or three at least, and yet they still remember the foraging map for this meadow. Bees communicate by dancing: they orient their bodies against the sun, and loop around in a figure-8, the duration and intensity of the waggle dance an indication of how far away and how plentiful the source is. She thinks they remember with her, the dances etched somewhere in her mind. In Germanic folklore, the bee is a part of the divine mind of God. They can never forget, and they can never die; instead they ascend from Earth alive, over the Moon and Sun to Heaven, their mouths filled with sweet honey to share in the afterlife.

As the sun sets they put up a tent, Astrid acquiescing to a campfire for Kevin. She feels cold now too, sometimes, even when the bees are healthy, although her tolerance is higher than Kevin’s. She thinks they have returned some of her humanity, her love. Kevin disagrees, “Love is not finite,” he says, “it is like the universe. It just keeps expanding.” She can have love for both the bees and the people, for all their respective faults, and she can still retain her own humanity. He thinks she is just remembering how to be a woman, how to stop apologizing for the bee part of her. For all the things they’ve done to the environment, both the humans and the bees, only one is innocent, a pawn on the board that the other sacrificed greedily. Astrid the human is innocent too; she has done everything she can to be good, do well. Or to do good, be well. She wonders if the two are mutually incompatible.

One day the universe will stop expanding, and it will reach entropy. All life will have ceased to exist long before then; stars burned out, atoms shredded, only a vague gas of photons and leptons remaining. Eventually gravity will pull the particles back together: a Big Bang followed by a Big Crunch. Long before that, Earth will have been destroyed; consumed by the dying sun. Humanity will have died long before that, or perhaps they would be progressive, develop ways to help instead of hurt. Perhaps they will become explorers, and fly to other quadrants in the galaxy. The universe is already so big, and it is only growing bigger. We will never explore it all, which means we will never be able to destroy it all. Nothing matters, they know that, but the bees do not, nor the fireflies, nor the stars in the sky. She kisses him next to the campfire; she tastes so sweet, like clover and wildflowers, a hint of citrus. The fireflies are dancing, jumping into the sky and becoming stars.

Astrid sets her camera up away from the fire for a long exposure of the meadow. She wants to record their dance for Kevin, and then she runs out into the field and dances with them. She is beautiful: skin glowing in twilight, the moon smiling down on her.

The next morning Astrid leaves to pick berries. She wants to make a jam with honey, so Heather and Sara can appreciate that animating sweetness she tastes in fruit. Heather will turn it into art, she hopes. A hawk screams at Kevin as he stays behind to tear the branches of Astrid’s shack down, to aid in the forest’s reclamation of the used wood. As he does so he sees a glint of silver: the ring, of course, that bee ring from so very long ago. Those early years of their lives feel so impossibly distant.

Astrid sneaks up on him as he tucks the ring in his pocket, and he doesn’t notice her until he hears the click-whirr of the shutter. He startles, but the shutter speed is fast; the photo will turn out beautifully: Kevin, perfectly framed, looking down and slightly away. His hair is a glowing halo in the sun, his thick sunglasses contrasting on his face. His pale skin is dotted with honey bees: they love him, so white and clean and sweet. He forgives them. There is nothing to forgive: how many generations of bees have lived and died since he was 12? An entire species cannot be blamed for a bee in the wrong place at the wrong time, and neither can he. He had said the same to Astrid when she finally confessed to him about her miscarriage. He knew the statistics. Dr. Fisher was an obstetrician, had lamented the fact that pregnancy loss is considered taboo; women’s feelings are swept under the table, they are encouraged not to talk about it. Then they blame themselves because no one ever told them how common it can be. He wants to mourn more for Astrid than for the loss; the life was never inside him, never a part of him. Yet he feels an unexpected sadness, an emptiness somewhere within.

After the sun sets, Astrid builds up the fire using scraps from her shack. The smell of smoke terrifies her, makes her skin crawl. She feels each spark spitting from the flames like a bee sting, no matter where it lands. Each piece of burning ash is her responsibility, her fault if they land on dry tinder and ignite. Yet she keeps adding wood, the flames growing higher. She is a goddess: she will bear the responsibility, and she absorbs the sparks so the forest will not. The sky is overcast, clouds heavy. It is going to snow on this day, too; two years now since the bees disappeared during a blizzard. Astrid is exquisite as she swoops down on Kevin with a blanket, and then she is kissing him, sparks igniting where their skin touches. The wind is biting, and he holds her close under the blanket. She feels electric, skin prickling, like ants are crawling all over her, but never bite.

There are some ways to make honey into a poison: infants can’t eat it, for example, because it may contain Clostridium botulinum bacteria. The bacteria produces a toxin that can cause potentially fatal muscle weakness. Honey made near Rhododendron  trees can contain a neurotoxin from the plant’s nectar and pollen; the Greeks used this honey to cripple Roman armies before battle during the Mithridatic Wars, over 2,000 years ago. Depending on the species of tree, the honey can cause a wide range of symptoms, from a mild euphoria, to seizures or even death. Honey can also be infused with a toxin: for example, the THC in the joint Astrid has brought with her. As if kissing her wasn’t addictive enough, Kevin can feel his head swimming, the sweetness in her intoxicating. She straddles him, kisses him, her touch so light and silky, and he runs his fingers along her back, feels her skin prickling in the cold. Then he leans back, hands behind him, and tilts his face up towards the snow. The fat flakes that land on his skin in icy pinpricks are just enough distraction to keep from becoming overwhelmed.

Chapter 29

After the snow melts, no later than mid-morning, Astrid and Kevin make their way to their pond. The water is thick with silt, stirred up by activity near the bottom. They both step into it, Astrid treading water awkwardly, arms stiff. The bees have learned to stay away from her when she is in water, and any other time she desires privacy. They swim lazily in circles around each other, orbiting some point midway between them. Astrid yelps when she feels something brush past her foot, a turtle maybe, then Kevin teases her and she blushes, face aglow. When they are thoroughly chilled, Kevin’s lips a shocking shade of blue, they pull themselves out of the water and stretch out in the sun. The dark fabric of Kevin’s sun-blocking shirt warms quickly, and as he listens to the humming around Astrid, he thinks he can almost make out what the bees are saying.

After a while, Astrid gets up and picks up her camera. She is trying out a macro lens, and she is thrilled by the ability to take pictures of things up close. She thinks about Heather’s project, to paint the world how others see it. This is how Kevin sees the world: too nearsighted to see much beyond his nose, but powerful at discerning tiny details in objects close up. She focuses the lens on tiny insects, the details on leaves, the clusters of pollen in the center of a flower. When she returns, Kevin is sleeping. Perched on his nose is a tiny praying mantis, and Astrid is just quick enough to capture it on film before it scampers away.

The next week blurs together, time measured more by the rolls of film Astrid fills than the sun’s movements. Kevin is building a dark room for her in his house, and she is eager to learn how to develop her own prints. They are planning on moving Astrid in with him soon, since the bees are thriving and she doesn’t want them to disturb Heather. Kevin is dragging his feet, however, and she feels a slight tremor of anxiety every time the subject comes up, so she avoids it.

Then it is the solstice, the longest day of the year. It is the most exciting time of the year for the honey bees and they are ecstatic. This is the longest day they get to forage, and they work tirelessly to build their honey stores, optimistic for the coming change in season. Instead of a campfire they sit together under the stars, each pinprick of light a mystery. The Milky Way glows, and Astrid wonders what it smells like, all those nebulae, stars and black holes, planets and asteroids. Kevin is fidgeting, and she rests a hand on his arm, questioningly. He reaches into his pocket then holds out the ring, but he has forgotten what he is supposed to say. Instead he asks, “Do you remember Opportunity?”

“The rover?” It had launched 11 years ago, the same year they met.

“It was only ever expected to survive 90 days or so, but it’s still chugging along up there on Mars, every single day another pleasant surprise for the scientists.” Astrid smiles faintly, eyes darting questioningly from his hand to his face, wondering what the connection was. “I don’t know what my point here is,” he admits. She is so stunning, so radiating, so intimidating. He has definitely lost the plot, sitting there dumbly, hand still holding out the ring.

“Do you want to marry me?” Astrid finally asks.

“I really, really do.”

Astrid takes one last photograph of her meadow before they leave it for the last time, a cliched wildflower meadow landscape. They hike back to the trail, turning left instead of right - it continues into the mountains this direction, winding southeast to another trailhead 20 miles away. They are in no rush, and they frequently stop to explore, rest, pick berries, or listen to the birds. The air is changing: a hot, dry wind blows in, the clouds are churning up electricity. The setting sun is a brilliant orange, the sky lighting up purple around them, and when they finally reach the trailhead, it is storming.

Chapter 30

Astrid practically lives in the dark room most nights, while the bees sleep; they detest the odor of the developing chemicals, so pungent and acidic. She feels like a bee in the warm red glow of the work lights, the walls closing around her like honeycomb. The dark room is set up in the basement, with black curtains overlapping in the stairwell to block out any hint of light from above. At twilight, she crawls into bed with Kevin, bringing with her the biting scent of vinegar that itches his nose, wakes him. She wraps her arms around his pale, wiry frame, and he rolls over and kisses her sweetly. Some nights, he sits in the basement with her, the red lights so sweet to his eyes, and studies her work. She watches the prints develop diligently; just a second too long and they can be ruined. The photographs she prints are stunningly intimate, and Kevin thinks they belong in a gallery. Instead she just hangs them up with scotch tape around the house, and she often catches him standing solemnly in the hallway, distracted by a small detail in one of the photographs.

During the daytime, while Kevin is at work, Astrid sits outside in the garden, Echo prowling around her. She has planted a garden. It is small for now, but she intends to expand it, and she sits on the damp soil in the middle of the flowers, eyes closed, and pictures the flurry of activity around her: that intricate circle of life, that desperate struggle between predator and prey, those sexual tensions and competitions for food. Life is nasty, brutish, and short, but it is also beautiful, creative, and infinite. Even on the brink of destruction, it finds a way to persevere, to grow, to thrive. Kevin is into the second year of sampling for his native bee research grant, tracking the correlation between population and fruit yield in orchards. The year is looking promising, with record-high native bee populations and production nearly approaching normal in a post-honey bee world. His colleagues are beginning to estimate that native bees will reach or even surpass honey bee pollination efficiency within 5 years, and Astrid feels as though a weight has been lifted from her shoulders. It is not our responsibility anymore . The bees are allowed to forage for their own purposes, and she will protect them, just as she will protect her humanity. She often sleeps outside that summer, in the sun or under the moon, and she dreams that the bees are carrying her to the stars.

Buddhists celebrate Madhu Purnima, the Honey Moon Festival, in late August or early September, depending on the year’s lunar cycles. The festival commemorates a time when the Buddha found himself lost in a forest in Bangladesh. An elephant and a monkey brought food to the Buddha, the elephant offering fruits, and the monkey offering honeycomb. When the Buddha accepts the honey, the monkey takes off to swing through the trees, overcome by excitement, but he is careless, and falls from the trees to his death. The elephant later dies of loneliness after losing his monkey friend, and the two are reincarnated together as deities in Tavatimsa.

*        *        *

On Labor Day, Astrid and Kevin join his parents at a park to watch fireworks. Astrid isn’t used to the crowds, and her skin is crawling; the sounds are deafening, and Hugo shakes nervously at Kevin’s feet, and the acrid smell of the fireworks fills their nostrils, but they pretend to enjoy it for his moms’ sakes. They buy snow cones, with extra syrup for Astrid, and her mood brightens as she sips the sweet, fruit flavored ice. Still, she is relieved when they finally return to the car, and cranks the window open so she can feel the night breeze on her face.

They are about halfway home when Astrid realizes that the smoke smell irritating her nose is getting stronger, not fading, and suddenly the odor is so painfully familiar to her that her heart stops. For a moment she is back in her childhood bedroom, listening to the bees beg for her as the flames grow larger in the hallway. Then she screams for Heather to stop the car and jumps out while it is still rolling, Hugo following shortly after. They stand still for a moment as the breeze shifts, the black lab’s nose high in the air, then take off together in the same direction. Kevin chases after them, following a trail of buzzing bees and the sweet scent of honey until it is replaced by smoke, and the air rapidly becomes thicker and darker. He already has his cell phone out, dialing 911 as he crests a hill and finds himself in front of a house that is almost entirely consumed in flames. Astrid stands in front of it, eyes wide, horrified. Hugo is barking and whining and she hisses at him to shush, the fierce sound foreign coming from her mouth. Through the rushing of the flames, Kevin hears a high-pitched wailing, and when Astrid turns her head to look at him he realizes with horror that it is coming from somewhere inside the house.

Kevin races down the hill, but Astrid grabs him as he tries to run past her, to the house. He whirls around to face her, but it is not her face. She is disintegrating before his eyes, dissolving into a black cloud, and then millions of bees fly out in different directions like an explosion. The swarm moves as one, flying first towards Kevin, separating in two just before it hits him, then it curves upward and into the house. Glass shatters, the flames growing, and Kevin’s heart stands still. The heat from the house burns his face, the glowing flames hungrily devouring the walls, carpets, curtains, furniture. After several excruciating minutes, the window darkens as the swarm races out of the flames then swoops towards the ground, condensing on the grass. By the time Kevin catches up to them it is just her, curled up around a tiny, red-faced infant in her arms, and he is relieved to hear it still screaming, because it means it is still breathing.

Sirens drown out the infant’s screaming and lights flash around them as firefighters arrive. Kevin starts to stand but Astrid grabs his arm. “They’re gone,” she whispers, voice thick, cracking, so full of sorrow. She means the parents, as well as the few dozen scouts she sent into the flames to look for them, and she clutches the baby to her chest and sobs. An EMT gently tries to take the baby from her but she resists, pulls away, the buzzing in her ears drowning out the woman’s pleas. She is wild, manic; she wants to sting anyone who comes near them. Then Kevin is in front of her, hands on her shoulders, looking intently into her eyes. His white face is streaked with ash, the smell of smoke enveloping them as the flames still rage in the house behind them. When she finally hands the infant over to the EMT, she immediately misses its weight in her arms.

She is led to a gurney, and someone places an oxygen mask on her, and she remembers to breathe again. She is uninjured, just some smoke inhalation, and she declines a trip to the hospital. She cannot see the baby as they bring it into the ambulance; there are too many people surrounding it, trying to breathe life into it, and then she collapses in the grass as the ambulance drives away, sirens fading into the distance. She stays resolutely through the night, watching the flames finally die as the first rays of the sun peak over the horizon.

Epilogue

The Sān people of the Kalahari desert, one of oldest human cultures on Earth, tell the story of Mantis, the first man, who lived alone on a planet covered with water. Mantis asked a bee to help him find the purpose of all life, and the bee carried him over the stormy waters, searching for someone or something to guide him. As the days passed she grew weak and weary, and the weight of Mantis began to pull her out of the sky. Just as she was about to lose hope, she spotted a white flower, floating in the distance. She was barely able to reach it, but when she did she gently placed Mantis in the flower, planting in him a seed. When the sun rose and the flower opened the next day, Mantis woke up, and from the seed in him the first Sān was born.

The miracle baby's name is Charlotte, and she was only 2 weeks old when she survived the fire that killed her parents. Her mom was a hair stylist, still recovering from a c-section two weeks prior, and her dad was on paternity leave from his job at an insurance agency. I have learned all this from Charlotte's aunt, whom I am relieved to learn has legal guardianship over the baby, and is in the process of adopting her. Charlotte's aunt calls me a week after the fire to thank me and to ask if I want to see her before they move back to her home on the east coast. I politely decline each time she asks, but she manages to keep me on the phone for over an hour as she alternates between hysterical crying and bubbling gratitude.

Then, finally, she thanks me one last time, and the click from her end of the line frees me. I turn to my laptop on the countertop, open to a word document. I had been writing my novel, that little piece of significance, when the woman called me. I set the phone on the counter and step outside. The late summer air is crisp, grey clouds threatening rain, the air thick with foreboding. Terpenes scent the air as the trees shed their leaves, and the rainbow of colors piling on the ground smells musky and fertile as they decay, the earth reclaiming her materials. I make my way to my garden and sit in the dirt. I am surrounded by honey bees, and they are happy, and they are sweet. My eyes close as I listen to the bees hum around me, searching for the last blossoms of the year.