Melissa brought a stool to the edge of the hive, wooden and warm. Bees always kept their hives at the right temperature, beating their wings to circulate air or make heat. If the hive knew you, you could just about cuddle against it, but never quite. Bees were smart, were loving as a whole. As an individual, a bee knew only to protect, no matter the cost.
She slid a ceramic plate beside a hole in the hive. In a moment, bees covered the plate and the generous slice of cake she had cut for them. That was the etiquette. Whenever the family expanded or contracted, gasped or groaned, one of them had to tell the bees. Days after Melissa was born, her father brought her fresh from her mother's breast to the hive, that the bees might know her. She was much too young then for a first taste of the honey, for the sweet of the bees' labors for their kin--it would have spoiled her palate, anyway--but there might never again have been honey had the bees borne the insult of ignorance.
She edged the plate closer to the hive. One of the bees took the liberty to crawl over her fingers. She brought her to her face, utterly fearless, utterly afraid. She whispered, "I don't love him."
The bee buzzed her wings and flew back to the cake. Melissa adjusted her stool, careful to keep the lace hem of her dress from dragging in the dirt. This would be her daughter's dress, perhaps, as it had been her mother's.
"I don't love him," she repeated in a braver voice, confident that she would not be heard over the buzz of an excited hive, "but the deed has been done. Our souls are knit before the Lord."
She had been stung dozens of times in her life among the bees, on her family's apiary on the bay. You couldn't keep bees without accepting the inevitability of the pain that would come. It hurt the solitary bee far worse, tearing out their guts with the lethal barb. That's how life was. You hold back the hurting until the last moment, until there was nothing else you could do to save your kin, knowing it would be the last thing you ever got to do. You stung, pumped your venom, and you died.
Yellow jackets could sting forever, and went on living. They did no good for the world, but the Lord let them go on. Bees were fragile but did good without asking more than acknowledgment and some tenderness.
When grandpa died, she draped the hive in black. When his coffin hit the bottom of the grave, she dropped the hive to the stand in kind. They stung her then, swelled her hand, but she little noticed.
Papa said the bees could hardly see, but she wondered still how she looked to them now, their hundreds of tiny eyes like gems. She fidgeted the ring on her finger, the stone dark amber, imagining the bees' impression of her. Could they know what it meant to be distraught? No, but maybe trapped. They knew parasites, too. They knew invasion. When this happened, they did not mourn that it couldn't be another way. They did what needed doing for the good of the hive.
He was a good man, mama had said, which meant only that he was good enough in the circumstances. He would suffice. The bees buzzed their understanding of "good enough," or maybe only because the cake was like spun sugar and the frosting, sweet butter. Traces of this cake, of the pollen from her bouquet, of the salt in the sweat of her brow greedily kissed away by a bee, would make their way into the hive. This day would nourish a fresh generation and, in time, would feed her family. Today would spread wide, inexorable. She would kiss her baby with lips soft from today's beeswax, fed by cake and tears.
"One bee, its sole happiness, doesn't matter," she reminded the hive, flying balletic in the air, drunk with sweet. "No one bee is the hive, but each is as much the hive as any other." She sighed long, the air struggling through her throat until she corrected the lie. "Except the queen. If not for her, the link is broken, and the hive is barren." Deep within the hive, she wondered if this queen could hear of her exalted status. This was not the original queen, nor her descendant, who died beneath papa's thumb for allowing her betrayal when another colony invaded. The look in papa's eyes as he'd done it, the disappointment of necessity, flashed through her when she had herself been its subject. He had to do it, Melissa knew. You couldn't coddle a colony of strangers who displaced your own, not when the hive was bred true. Too much depended on the purity.
Would the bees have stopped producing honey if Melissa had kept mum? Would they have left or died? She didn't know and lacked the courage and heartlessness to find out. Breaking a promise to tell the bees was a sin too grievous to be allowed to count against her soul, not with the tally where it stood. The bees were innocent, no matter the wickedness of the world that fostered them.
"You are tiny and, though you have stung me and will again, I love you too well ever to let my inaction harm you. I will always tell you, of that I promise," she said, not wholly to the bees.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.