the buzz of bees

A constant buzz was in the air. The flowers were full of them, but also the tall grasses, the beach sand, the low lit cabins at night. It was nearly the end of summer and like the bees, whose sound they emulate, the plants, trees, humans, even inanimate things were all getting busy.

I was in Cabin 9 with my new friend, Patrice. She was one score past seventeen. I found her milling about the supplies store with her cat in a bag peeking out. She'd seen a lot in her days and still loved to boogie down the aisles as the Isley Brothers played over the tiny speakers. There was little room for bass coming from those speakers, planted high on the ways, still Patrice swayed from corn starch to baked goods humming low notes to fill out the needs for the song.

I saw her in the check out line. I distracted an elder lady, pointing to the gum and slipped by to be behind her. Patrice saw my move, and when I put down the plastic bar to divide her purchases from my own on the rubber belt to the cashier, she took the bar in hand and gave me a smack on the arm.

At first alarmed, I then took one of my farm fresh eggs and threw it at her shoes. She laughed a deep and intense laugh, her tiny frame shuddering, her long, blonde curls thrown back with her body an arc to boom out her continuous laughter with force to reach through floorboards below and through my very shoes. A quake.

The quince paste? She rubbed in my face.

The mustard? I got on her skirt.

The kumquats? She made me do squats, bending low and taking a bite with each dip.

The cashier thought us crazy. We were. But not crazy enough to know how to get to the next place to elongate our craziness. We paid, offered to clean, but instead were pushed out by broom and it seemed we were buddies to be.

I flipped a coin. She caught it in the air. I said I didn't care and we'd go to cabin 9. We did. We made a feast of frozen things in the oven–which all came out spectacular. We made like the bees. We were busy. We played Yahtzee. She sneezed a few times, I took that as a mating sign. I dove for her and we made the most out of the dwindling sunlight, the summers final offerings in powerful scents and smells as the sensory world would again be shepherded by old man winter into the luminous final stages of the year.

We were people of the fall, anyway. Apple pickers. Tree climbers. Collectors of all things nuts. We were predisposed with a genetic understanding of winter and the shadow of death. We were star children betting on a place beyond death, though just below the furrowed brow, in some furrowed frontal lobe, we unconsciously understood that pain and suffering to get to the next astral plain would be unbearable. We were like onions. We felt compassion for them–that's why we cried each time cutting a peeling them, thinking of all the layers we'd sliced away, heated in the skillet of final agony, becoming translucent, ghost-like but oh so flavorful! All in order to make it to the next stage, the next showtime, the next performance if karma was a cooking show, surely we'd been through the prep stages. Surely.

But it wasn't up to us to name the time and place of presentation. It was the show's producers, the cosmos–and one got the feeling, especially while laying out at the beach dropping eggs on each other, pushing away the hungry hermit crabs and shooing away seagulls–that maybe the cosmos were askew. What if they hired the wrong host for the show of shows? What is said host wasn't ready with lines memorized, the corporal being prepared to deliver with conviction when the cameras began shooting?

Oh. It was illuminating and the purple from the night sea, the inky inkiness so apparent in the last chapters on the road; we succumbed in slumber and woke to find ourselves as ourselves, curious about this person wrapped well in our arms as ivy, shaken as whole milk to butter, the buzz of bees.