Hosea came to his truth in March. He was the elder, his legs almost useless, and the farmland hives were dying.
“I must be given.”
As soon as he spoke, everyone roused from a kind of walking sleep. The community began to feed Hosea a diet of honey and water, bathing him gently and telling him old family stories. The farm’s remaining hives were raided and every last comb taken.
The old man ate less and less as the days passed. Most of the gathered honey was stockpiled.
The community lived in an old restaurant on the edge of the farm, over the hill from the hives. The members slept in the booths, in the stock room, in the kitchen. After Hosea could no longer walk, a broken freezer in the back was pulled open and cleaned. It was laid down and filled with hot lavender-scented water, then scrubbed again and again.
Hosea began to smell of honey. He wept honey and that is what his bowels gave up. He’d been made clean.
On the day, the community filled their pots and pans with what they’d taken from the hives. They warmed the new honey and poured it into the bottom of the freezer and, when he was ready, helped Hosea down into the golden mass.
Sighing, he said he was warm. He could sleep now. The elder spoke one last time:
“Wait for a year. Not before then.” He let out a breath and remained still as they began pouring again.
A year passed and it was a hard year. No more than a few hives were left. Little grew that could be eaten. Life on the farm was winding down to stillness.
Finally, the freezer was unchained and opened as the community watched. Seen through the crystallizing honey, Hosea was blurred, his eyes slightly open. He looked like an insect in amber. Desdemona, heavily pregnant, reached into the old freezer. She pushed through the honey to the changed flesh and closed Ringo’s eyes, holding down the lids, lest he see how hungry his children had become.
The freezer was closed and tied to a wheeled cart. Then every starving man or woman jack pushed and pulled it up the low scrubby hill. From the top of the hill rows of hives could be seen in the valley, a city for insects grown strangely quiet. Then the freezer got away from them and rolled on its own down the hill, like an eager child racing, until the incline flattened in front of the first rank of hives. There the freezer stopped, dust boiling around the cart’s wheels.
Desdemona, running behind, threw open the freezer door. Revealed, the honey glowed under the sun and buzzing became audible from everywhere. Bees rose up from every still-living hive and coalesced into a black mass before descending onto Ringo’s sepulcher. Desdemona fled through a curtain of bees, unstung, her baby lively in her belly.
On the hill, the community waited for her and for the coming of newly-made queens.
Julie McNeely-Kirwan‘s work has appeared in Five South, Flash Fiction Weekly, Every Writer’s Resource, Spine, Show Us Your Shorts, and Overtine, among others. She lives with two elderly rescue dogs in Harrison, Arkansas.