2021 theme: RUPTURE

THE SOUND OF BEES Trevor Warren Something was missing in the air, like just after a storm and the whole world feels stiling and empty. Where before there’d been a hum. These were the times it was easier not to see anyone and to hole myself up in my drab apartment. I listed reasons not to go out like I was telling them to a therapist.

Oh, so you think that because some people wear surgical masks in public there’s a secret plague no one told you about? Tell me more about that...

Until there was, and the masks were hanging everywhere. Of of ears, car mirrors, and of of the crabapple tree in the center of campus. The masks were hung all over it like a dreadful bloom.

That was done nearly a year ago, right about the time I got to college.

One mask appeared; it had maybe blown there, and then the rest gradually followed.

Sometime before winter, when I got back to my apartment, a package was dropped on my doorstep. I thought I could hear it buzzing before I even picked it up.

You’ll bee okay — Dad; on the note, and inside were cotton gloves, neatly tied in an intense yellow ribbon — a glimpse of sun.

The card pictured a tiny honeybee hovering fatly past a lower.

Finally, I could breathe deep without feeling sick. I pressed my face into the lavender and honey infused gloves and the world, drunk all on its own and loud, stopped.

Dad was the only one who really understood me. And I could feel the stretch of my own smile behind the gloves. On the back of the card were the words Mystic Honey, a spa and shop owned by Shari, a friend of Dad’s who made cosmetics and things from honey.

I’d always suspected that they were together: Dad, still reeling from his divorce — Shari who never married.

I liked that Dad still kept bees. Growing up, they had illed the spaces underneath the outside of my bedroom window for as long as I can remember.

I hadn’t slept as well since going away to school and the humming had stopped.

I thought a lot about those boxes that Dad had built, like small 95