This
bee keeps coming, beating its little head against my window. I don't know what it's seeking or why it keeps coming back. For ten minutes, it pushes against the glass, and then is gone for an hour, then back again, leaving tiny yellow spots I can only assume are
bee-blood. It's
killing itself trying to get in here, and I can't imagine what for. Does it see the bright colors of clothes strewn on the floor, the flowers on the old comforter I've had since I was little, and think it's found an untapped source of sustenance? Does
it know why it wants to
come in?
I think about it, and imagine that the impact when it throws its body against the window creates cracks
on the molecular level, that invisible bits of glass fall to the ground, like the aftermath of a car accident in
the world of Horton's Whos.
This bee, with its large, fluffy yellow-grey body, will
die. But it will pass on its mission to the
hive mind, and some other maverick will take it up. The next generation, one bee will come, then two, then four, then eleven.. And finally, this house will be abandoned,
condemned. I will be buried somewhere far away. And my window, which I spent only two months of my life looking out of, will be
brittle, riddled with small but ubiquitous fissures. And
a thousand bees will come, and dive in unison. The glass will shatter, most of it flying up as it becomes dust, like pieces of a puzzle exploded away from each other, no longer constrained by the pressure of the pieces around them.
The bees will burst into
what used to be my room, and a hundred other people's. Most will die, and
their yellow blood will fall like a thick rain over their small bodies. but one or two dying bees will send out the
signal, and the hive will become still,
alert, at the news of success. Then a billion bees will come from the woods, like a brown thundercloud, through the window.
And find in here whatever it is they want, or find that
the crusade was for nothing. But in a million years, perhaps my floor will be taken over by dusky flowers, growing in darkness or fed by sunlight from holes in the roof. Maybe in a million years the bees will find a
promised land.