​2018 CONTEST WINNER

Bees

Fiction by ​​Melissa N. Warren

I took our baby and walked while you were in surgery, because that is the safe thing to do when you are caring for an infant with a mind gone numb. I passed the house you like and found the new owner painting shutters.

“Nothing like teal to brighten things up,” she called to me as I passed. The baby’s fingers grasped at bees in the air, made stubby shadow puppets on the grass.

“Probably my bees!” the woman yelled, heading over as if I was smiling. “Wanna know what a Queen bee costs? Forty-nine dollars, and you can get your very own sent by mail in a little glass jar with a plug and directions for how to lure her out.”

The woman told me she got started last month, but after just a week of caring for her first hive, she woke to find oozing liquid, a foul smell, the poor insects frantically swarming.

“Wax moths,” she said. “Those things will kill a healthy hive in nothin’ flat.”

She pointed to a hanger and screwdriver she’d fashioned into a scalpel, explained she’d spent hours scraping the insides of the comb. The papery walls disintegrated in her hands as she tried to scour them of the parasites.

I stared at the pavement, wondering how far along the surgeons were at that point, if your duodenum was giving them the trouble they’d warned us against, or if any of the lining was covered with deadly marks. The woman’s hands mimed the plight of the bees, while I rubbed my shoe into a black mark on the asphalt.

“Had to choose: hold out longer, or end it quick with a good bit of gasoline and a match.”
She held her palms out like two scales. The right hand fell heavily down to show which choice she’d made. “That’s the spot I laid them down, right by your toe.”

She killed them, my love, burned them to that black mark on the ground. The queen she paid for and the others that moved in for free. The comb and the frame, the inside and the out. If you were here, you would joke about the irony, thicker than the metaphors, similes too heavy not to try just one or two aloud.

But you are lying on a table. I will walk back towards the granite walls to hear your results, and that woman is going to start up again when the new Queen arrives. In a month she’ll have honey, our baby will begin to crawl, and you will either be or not. I will reach for you in my sleep, my fingers crawling through either hair or open air, my feet inching towards either ankle or cold sheet. If you live, it will still happen: I will pass another hive one day, and I will worry about the tumor crawling inside, the tiny bulbous worms churning through your delicate fibers, your spirit yearning to swarm.

Melissa N. Warren
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Melissa N. Warren is delighted to return to publishing her work. During her teenage years and early 20’s, she published in literary journals in the South and won the Gold Award for her poetry with both National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts and National Scholastic. She spent the next decade traveling and writing place-based stories, some of which she published in a travel column before scribbling only at night and focusing on her young family. She recently returned to Northeast Ohio after six blissful years on an island in coastal Georgia. A mother of two now, her writing is inspired by nature hikes and seeing creatures through child-eyes.