QUEEN
Sandy Friedly Cortney sat high in the apple tree, watching the back door. Jake had come home from the ranch stinking of manure and bourbon and wrapped his big angry hands around her neck, all for asking him to wipe his boots better. She’d bolted for the car keys, but he grabbed her purse. When he turned, she billyclubbed the back of his knee with the fireplace poker. She ran for the tree. No way would he look up there. He never has. Fighting back wasn’t something she ever did, so it took them both by surprise. It was leaving that she was good at. She’d left Jake many times, but he’d always convince her to come back. “I can change,” he’d say. “I will change.” Each time she’d look into those startling blue eyes, him crying, and see the man she loved, the one who didn’t try to kill her most of the time, see the kid whose own father had actually roped him like a calf. Even the draft had rejected him, a thyroid problem of all things. How could she, of all people, let him down? Three branches below her in the apple tree, hung a bee swarm throbbing like a beating heart. It was the size of a holiday ham, about five pounds, she figured. Cortney knew the behavior of bees, their honey-filled bellies, their female stings, their need to move on. On warm days like this swarms loosen, letting the bees free to fly about. Some even crawled on the ground. A bee circled her knee. Another marched up her arm. Her hair tingled with bees. Cortney slipped her ponytail down the back of her shirt and popped up the collar. She missed her father, a beekeeper back in Idaho, and thought how it didn’t seem that long ago, really, that she’d helped him harvest the honey. She remembered licking her sticky fingers, chewing on honeycomb, always so calm in that buzzing world. She had been in that apple tree many cold nights, the branch on which she sat her cradle of safety. Now it was warm, the scent of apple blossoms filling her nostrils. Above, through the sun-dappled canopy, soared a perfect blue sky. Thousands of cellophane wings vibrated, filling the air with electric hum, and somewhere in that dark swarm a patient queen waited. She touched her neck where Jake had choked her, swallowed the soreness in her throat. Movement inside the house caught her eye, Jake peering out the bedroom window, calling 42
