Chapter 3 #3
A wrongness sits in the air around the box before I understand it.
It has nothing to do with sound yet, everything to do with the fine hairs standing up along my arms. When I get close enough to hear, the hum inside has gone thin and uneven.
It drops and climbs in a way no healthy hive ever does, not on a good morning over good clover.
It sounds like a hive arguing with itself.
It sounds, underneath that, like something almost like fear, if a box full of bees could be afraid of anything at all.
“Hey,” I say, soft, palm going flat against the wood, an old motion, worn smooth by ten thousand hives before this one. “Hey, now. What’s wrong with you.”
Nothing about the field looks wrong. The clover is thick and gold as ever. The wind is easy. But the sweetness under it, the good honest sweetness I’ve been swimming in all morning, has gone sour at the edges. Milk about to turn, a note under the note that shouldn’t be there.
I lean in closer, listening past the hum for whatever sits under it. I’m hunting the wrongness back to its root, same as I have hunted a hundred sick hives before this one, the mite, the damp, the queen gone quiet. I’ve done this so many times I could do it half asleep.
I don’t know, not yet, that this time I’m listening past the hive itself.
I reach for it anyway, chasing the wrongness back to its root.
For one heartbeat the field opens up under my hand, like a much bigger room than a field has any right to be.
The clover hum and the sour note and something else, deeper, older, run under both of them, like a second river beneath the one I can see.
I follow it without deciding to, the pull of a thread before I’ve decided whether I want to know what it’s sewn to.
The world tips.
It is not falling. More like the horizon deciding to sit at a different angle than it did one breath ago.
My ears go strange, a high thin ringing that swallows the clover-buzz and the wind and even, for one terrible stretched second, the sound of my own heart.
Heat floods up the back of my throat, and then something warm slides over my lip, and I taste copper before I understand what it is.
I pull my hand off the box like it has burned me.
The world rights itself, slow, my stomach still catching up to level ground.
The ringing thins back down into ordinary birdsong and ordinary bees.
My nose is bleeding, a thin steady line I catch on the back of my wrist before it can drip onto the hive lid.
My knees have gone watery enough that I sit straight down in the clover without deciding to.
For one breath, right at the edge of the ringing, before the ordinary world came all the way back, I could have sworn something answered.
Not the hive. Past the hive. A low, warm hum comes from somewhere off past the hedge at the field’s far edge.
The ground there rises into a thin stand of old trees I hadn’t paid any mind to all morning.
A note that leaned toward me, curious, almost glad, gone the instant I noticed it enough to be afraid of it.
I sit in the clover a good long minute, wrist pressed to my nose, heart going too fast. I look at that stand of trees like it might have an explanation to offer, if I stared hard enough. It doesn’t. Trees don’t talk, whatever else in this field seems to have opinions this morning.
“That was strange,” I tell the sky, because the hive isn’t in a position to receive complaints and there is nobody else out here to hear me say it.
The bleeding stops on its own after a while.
Same as it always has, the other times I pushed too hard chasing a bad hive down some rabbit hole of sound that wasn’t there to find.
Heat, I decide. Long morning, no breakfast worth the name beyond an egg and a fight with stale bread, standing too long in full sun with my head bent low over a box.
It isn’t the first time the world has gone sideways on me out in a field.
But this is the strangest that particular sideways has ever felt.
I owe myself that much honesty, the same kind the old woman taught me to give a hive.
The last hive is only a bad hive, I decide.
A queen gone off, maybe, or a sickness working through before it shows itself proper.
Every keeper loses one now and then to a season that turns wrong under her hands no matter how good those hands are.
I’ll watch it. I’ll come back tomorrow and see if the sour note has passed or settled in for good.
I get up, wipe my face clean with the hem of my skirt, and go back to work. The rest of the row still needs checking, and the bloom won’t wait on me feeling strange about one bad hour in an otherwise good morning.
By the time I turn the wagon back toward town, the sun rides well past noon and Bramble sleeps in a heap of feathered outrage on the seat beside me. I’ve mostly convinced myself of my own story by then. A bad hive. A long morning. Too much sun and not enough bread.
I don’t look back at the stand of trees at the meadow’s edge as I go. I tell myself that’s because there’s nothing there worth looking at.
I almost believe it the whole way home.