by Carson Pynes
Our Earth is a sacred network of life. Speculation allows me to connect my experience as a soul dwelling within a human body and my place within this intricate nexus.
The hive is in the skeleton of a tree. Hollow, the hum of the colony a faint tingle at the base of my skull.
Today is my birthday, and my father is showing me the newest beehive.
I was born during the days between winter and spring when the bees are dormant and the plants hide beneath the soil but the sap quickens in the trees and every day the light lingers a few low heartbeats longer on the horizon. This is the time when Persephone kisses Hades goodbye.
No one thinks of Persephone missing Hades, but I’ve always thought of her as goddess of both life and death. She encompasses both creation and quietus. She knows this balance is vital.
Each spring she pays Charon with dripping, golden wedges of honeycomb to ferry her across the dark river, a note left behind. To wake the dreaming bees, she whispers into the mouths of hives. For months, she toils to coax a riot of color from what was bare. But the creation of life requires rest, eventually. A deep tranquillity. So she returns. She pays Charon marigolds to take her home. What is death but birth, in reverse?
“They brought out their dead this morning,” Dad says, “There was enough sun for them today.”
Their corpses litter the entrance, crumpled bee husks excarnated at the mouth. I imagine apiary funeral rites. Bee Priestesses, all daughters, dancing of death.
I step closer. The hive is so wide I could never stretch my arms around it. Pale wood and gnarled, lopped-off branches, rings like the whorls of a fingertip. When I peek into the knot-hole, I glimpse blonde honeycomb, like the cornsilk hair at the nape of my husband’s neck.
Three days ago, sprawled in our bed, he told me he wants us to start making babies. He’d mumbled into my neck, hazy, then rolled over and slid into sleep. I’d lain awake until moonset, turning over, restless. When I finally slept, I dreamed of flowers sprouting in time-lapse, flash-blooming, crumbling into ash.
I want to stroke the wax of the tree colony with the backs of my knuckles but I’ve been stung enough times to know better. When a bee stings to protect her colony, she dies a brutal death. Her barb stays embedded in flesh, torn away from the rest of herself.
“They were in a snag that fell,” says Dad. His voice is a swirl of over-educated academia and Texas twang like Beethoven played on a banjo. “Over down the highway a-ways, back towards town. I got a call, some people were sawing into the tree with a chainsaw when the bees came out and told them that they were there. I just loaded it into the back of the truck.”
I shuffle around the hive widdershins, wordless. Frowning. I reach out my hand and then draw it back.
“What did you name them?” I ask.
Dad only names some of the hives. The tropically-evolved colony, what some call “Africanized." He named them “The Punks.” When I was a defiant kid, he would tell me, swallowing a smile, that I was being a punk, too. Of all our bees, The Punks are the most likely to survive. They’re adaptable, hardier than the others.
Dad shrugs. “Nothing yet.”
No name. A bad omen.
Four years ago, there were 13 colonies.
Now there are six.
What to name a colony that may be doomed, alive for now in a long-dead tree? Cared for by a beekeeper during an era of ravenous, galloping climate change, one that will kill half the species on this planet by 2050, after Dad is gone and it’s only me left here, desperate to keep the colonies alive. Will my own daughter help me tend the bees? Will I know enough to save them?
What right do I have, to bring a baby into this? Will there be anything left for me to place into her hands?
I press my palm against the grain of the wood, seeking vibration. There is only a low thrum. Where there should be a thunderstorm contained within the bark, I feel only a soft, tickling murmur.
I will name the colony. They deserve a chance.
I try again. Closing my eyes, my fingertips sense the throbbing tide of black-and-gold bodies, the queen in the center like a dark jewel. I see Persephone, somehow both ruler of the underworld and goddess of spring. She is grinning like a skull, like a child, the flowers in her hair bloom and wither and bloom again. My husband, sleeping, his hand on my belly.
A small girl with cornsilk hair.
When I bend down to whisper the name I have chosen into the mouth of the colony, their buzzing surges from a gentle susurrus to an electric roar of wings. With their name, they wake.
Today is my birthday. Three decades ago, a beekeeper named me after his favorite author. I was born in the liminal space between winter and spring when the bees bestir themselves and the plants scream upward from the soil and the light returns to kiss the sleeping earth awake.
It’s the time of year when death transforms herself, once again, into life.
A beehive is never just that. She is kaleidoscopic. Myriad. Teeming. She is vast; symbiotically balanced with wildflowers, raindrops pattering on leaves, sun that warms the loam.
Within the vibration of a beehive is the knowledge of our profound connection to this planet. Our Earth is a sacred network of life. Speculation allows me to connect my experience as a soul dwelling within a human body and my place within this intricate nexus. It allows me to express both my deep anguish for the destruction of our environment, and my obstinate hope that we will find a way to harmony.
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Carson Pynes lives in the heart of the city, near the place where the veil between worlds is thin. A former resident of the Land of the Morning Calm and the Emerald Isle, she is currently studying creative writing at a university in the Southwest. She is usually outdoors with her partner and two beings which, at first glance, resemble rescue dogs.