Summer had faded into fall and your heart was heavy as you planned to wrap the bees up for winter. That’s what you told me.
“It feels so good to get out in the fresh air,” you said, “and listen — their gentle hum all day long, their crowded buzzing into the hives at night.”
You talked about sleeping in the bee yard overnight, sometime, just so that you could know when they awakened — what time of day, and whether they all roused at once or slowly came to life, a few at a time until the whole beehive sang with their morning cadence. At that time of year, the wild asters and the last of the lazy susans dotted the fields around the hives and a river cascaded behind them. I’d only been out there a few times, feeling like a third wheel amongst you and your insect lovers.
The night you slept with the bees you didn’t tell me beforehand and I had no idea where you were. I panicked, thinking you’d left for good and I looked for your prized possessions, confident you wouldn’t leave those behind — the old guitar your dad bought you at a church rummage sale, the wind chimes tinkling on the veranda, the short-sleeved shirt tucked at the back of your closet with a safety pin for the top button. I used to tease you that you thought about making love to your bees all night — that you cherished them more than me and could lie in their sweet embrace and listen to the life they lived around you — and gently fall asleep.
There was a timely rhythm to your bee excursions, except for in the winter when they were covered in snow. You went every Saturday to inspect the hives — to see if any other animal had been around, like the bear that upset the hives once or the sly wolverine who sniffed underneath for small rodents, knocking everything askew so that when you found them the bees were buzzing fiercely, angry and out of tune.
I wondered if you felt like that the night you slept with the bees and never came home. We’d had a spat about the man next door — Mr. Jenkins talking to me all the time and me giving him a jar of gooseberry jam and him telling me my hair looked like fire, all shades of ginger and wavy like the Greek gorgon, Medusa. There wasn’t anything going on, but I pictured you lying down on the ground, letting the bees drown out your fears, hoping they would take you up and croon a consoling lullaby.
Because the next day when we found you — me and Mr. Jenkins — you had stopped breathing, and there was no heartbeat and your face was open to the sky, with only a few stings, and there was very little to suggest you hadn’t enjoyed your sleep-over and much more to say that you had breathed your last breath listening and soaking in the essence of your bee-lovers.
Me and Mr. Jenkins? Let’s say we slept together then, but it didn’t seem nearly as natural as you looked under that morning sky, after the night you slept with the bees.
Connie L Cook lives in southern Ontario and is a retired social worker. She has been previously published in magazines such as Our Canada and Rural Route, as well as writing a weekly column for a newspaper, The Dundalk Herald. She was a finalist in the Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story (2015) and the The Mariposa Writers Group Story competition. Her work has been published in several anthologies of short stories and in online magazines such as CommuterLit and Every Day Fiction. She is currently writing her first novel.
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