The Girl with Bees in Her Hair

came in an envelope with no return address; she was small, wore wrinkled dress of figured cotton, full from neck to ankles, with a button of bone at the throat, a collar of torn lace. She was standing before a monumental house— on the scale you see in certain English films: urns, curved drives, stone lions, and an entrance far too vast for any home. She was not of that place, for she had a foreign look, and tangled black hair, and an ikon, heavy and strange, dangling from an oversize chain around her neck, that looked as if some tall adult had taken it from his, and hung it there as a charm to keep her safe from a world of infinite harm that soon would take him far from her, and leave her standing, as she stood now—barefoot, gazing without expression into distance, away from the grandeur of that house, its gravel walks and sculpted gardens. She carried a basket full of flames, but whether fire or flowers with crimson petals shading toward a central gold, was hard to say—though certainly, it burned, and the light within it had nowhere else to go, and so fed on itself, intensified its red and burning glow, the only color in the scene. The rest was done in grays, light and shadow as they played along her dress, across her face, and through her midnight hair, lively with bees. At first they seemed just errant bits of shade, until the humming grew too loud to be denied as the bees flew in and out, as if choreographed in a country dance between the fields of sun and the black tangle of her hair. Without warning a window on one of the upper floors flew open— wind had caught the casement, a silken length of curtain filled like a billowing sail—the bees began to stream out from her hair, straight to the single opening in the high facade. Inside, a moment later—the sound of screams. The girl—who had through all of this seemed unconcerned and blank—all at once looked up. She shook her head, her mane of hair freed of its burden of bees, and walked away, out of the picture frame, far beyond the confines of the envelope that brought her image here—here, where the days grow longer now, the air begins to warm, dread grows to fear among us, and the bees swarm.