Sound of Bees

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

shantytowns — his one whack at saving the world. And it was pretty great. For a long time, I was pretty sure that the only things he believed in were those bees; the way he treated them like his gaudy little babies. And I loved watching him fumbling into the big white suit and mask and walking around like a spaceman. Since leaving home, I’ve missed the bees almost as much as I missed him. And my irst summer in college I’d read poems by Sylvia Plath, which made it a colossally sad summer. I wondered if her dad had lost bees; I was so constantly afraid that they might die in their little boxes. So much colony collapse disorder was hovering around Treasure Valley. It had already gotten to several of the colonies kept by our old neighbors along the Snake River. For most of them, the bees were up and gone, stolen by disease or some kind of change that only the bees could sense. I would have visited sooner but traveling was impossible that summer of lattening the curve, and most of the sunshine was replaced by silence. I remembered once, at twelve or thirteen, Dad tried to tell me that I was somehow existing in too many places at once; which was why I had panic attacks, he said; that’s why I felt chronically overwhelmed, he said; that’s why I was so worried. “If humans were more like bees,” he’d have said, “we’d work together instead of feeling like we have to be everything at once and do everything alone.” Those words illed my head a few days from then, when Dad would call to say grandpa died. The worst feeling in the world would be when grandpa’s box is lowered into the ground and I’m watching it from the face of a computer. We’d all be on a video call, even mom. From all those miles apart, the air will seem thick with static, like we’re all there together. I’ll remember imagining that the way the bees communicate through chemicals and through the electromagnetism of the earth; that’s how we’re all communicating then. Not through the fuzzy speakers of the laptop. And the ceremony will be shared from Aunt Marta’s phone. Aunt Marta, who will be in her scrubs, in the middle of the worst of it, will somehow be able to hold the phone still for the time it takes for the box to disappear. She’s haunted by more than a tree of face masks. But she’s who will link us all

together. Dad will be hovering in front of the camera, trying to keep everyone’s moods lifted. He’ll say something like, “Pop is inally home with Queen Bee.” The name everyone knew Grandma by. She started the irst family hives, and I was glad she didn’t have to be around for all of the colony collapse and empty boxes. Shari will be there, too. She’ll stand close to dad, and maybe their hands will link, and mom will be standing apart from her new husband. Shari even decides to send them home with a collection of soaps and scented gloves and bath bombs. Days later we’ll ind out that it wasn’t what everyone thought that took grandpa, it was just his heart that had ruptured. Sometimes things did that. Even when we’re like bees, always sensing something invisible and sometimes abandoning each other, we’ll always ind a way to connect. And I’ll decide to book a ticket home to help Dad build another bee box. And when I go home and I lay in my old bed, I’ll hear the hum again.