When last I saw you, my sweet, my love, you’d shrunk to the size of Grandma’s thimble, plucked from the porch by the bees of the forest. We heard your cries, your wild shrieks of delight, as they carried you to the place beyond the southern brambles. Listened, after, to the silence that followed, to the empty fields and the dark shadows beneath the trees where no bee remained to hum its evening song.
You’ve been gone a five-month, and Grandma does not know your name anymore, nor does Jordy or Cousin Ferdinand or our dear, sweet Claudette. Whatever magic was used to shrink you, to make your final exit possible, stole all memories of you from those you once deemed as close as family.
But I still recall everything about you, my love, just as I remember your delighted squeal upon being taken aloft, just as I can summon the tiny hymn of joy on your lips as you fled to the place where I cannot follow. I know the contours of your face, burned into my mind on the first day we met, when you emerged from the forest in your dress of black and gold, and we conversed for hours and days on end, talked until you kissed me and declared that we would be lovers.
You tasted of honey that day, my love: so sweet; so sultry; so wild.
For those who prefer the technical term, you were taken by Aspis mellifera, the common honey bee. The Latin fascinated you, the first time you encountered it. You had me trace its genus in my books, explain the origins of the word. Aspis: bee. Melli: honey. Ferre: to bear. A designation proposed by Carolus Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, who later realized his mistake and tried to correct it.
In that respect, my sweet, my love, he is a smarter man than I.
People ignored his calls to use mellificia—maker of honey—in place of his first attempt. They did not care that it was inaccurate after growing used to the first nomenclature. Others did not fret about incorrect designations, nor comprehend the need to correct such an insignificant error.
Sometimes, in your heart, you understand things to be true, even if they are also wrong.
When we married, my sweet, my love, you carved a slice of our wedding cake and took it to the brambles. You left it there, that the bees would learn of your happiness, and spread news of it through the world.
We held our reception in the barn, danced across the dusty wooden floor and ate of the feast Cousin Ferdinand prepared, served on those great trestle tables laden with cakes and roast meats and pies. We did not own those tables, my love. Ferdinand acquired them from generous neighbors, much as he brought in the food and drink by calling upon those who owed him favors.
People thought highly of my family once, leastwise around these parts.
We had oft discussed what it must be like in the place beyond the brambles. I suspected you of being a bee-wife, right from the beginning, even though you promised otherwise. We each told Claudette different tales about the kingdom of the hives. In mine, the bees inhabited a golden land, serving the Queen with a slavish devotion. Beyond the brambles there were rivers of honey and flower-covered hills, vast swathes of clover where the bees could rejoice and play.
In your stories, the land beyond the bramble was merely another bee-hive. Bigger. Grander. More impressive. You saw no need to personify, held no truck with suggesting magic as an idyllic force in their lives.
“Why should the bees conform to your human desires?” you asked me. “Must you make strange things so familiar before you can appreciate their beauty?”
I call Claudette our daughter, but I know this child is not truly mine. No get of a bee-wife’s womb will ever belong to their father.
Claudette shares your hair, your smile, your face. She shares your penchant for walking the fields, letting the bees gather around her. She shares your knack for speaking to the swarms, coaxing them into a conversation.
Occasionally the bees sting her, but Claudette doesn’t cry out.
The bees are hers, as they’d once been yours, and I fear they will take her as well.
I am not a foolish man, my love. I knew, when we married, that it would be forever.
The men of our village accept brides from the forest. Nettle brides and fox brides and daughters of the elm and the willow and the river. They are often beautiful, always enchanting, and none have ever stayed for long. They come, they marry, they bear us children, and then the trees reclaim them.
We do not speak of it, not in the open, but it’s common knowledge such things happen. When you disappeared, oh my love, people came to our door to pay their respect. The delivered foods—frozen blocks of casserole to defrost and microwave—and said nothing about your origins.
“Be pleased you’ve got your daughter,” they told me. “Claudette, she is a bonnie girl.”
I ask about you, to prompt some lingering recollections, but their memories are fading, or faded and gone.
This, too, I expected, given who you were.
I make lists of the things I no longer recall: your name; our first words on the day we met; the exact and specific color of your eyes on the evening of the summer storms.
That thing you told me, that morning. The one before you went away.
I make lists of the things I remember still: we can measure the average life of a worker bee in months. Weeks sometimes, in colder climbs, where winters are long and cruel. The average life-span of the Queen gets measured in years, often four, but sporadically longer.
I never learned your age, my love. We did not celebrate birthdays in our house.
I do not know if you’re alive or dead, although I keep hoping for one or the other.
I spend the evenings on our back deck, my love, watching the brambles and the forest and the stars. I drink beer and write these letters, never quite sure where to send them, and I pretend that somewhere out there you can yet hear me and remember us as we were.
Some nights, when the sky is clear, Jordy comes out to join me. He is older—his brown skin worn to leather—and haunted by the same look that I recognize in the mirror now. He sits with me a while, and brings me a fresh beer, and the earthy scent of the field is replaced by the lilac of Jordy’s hair tonic and the mint of the gum he chews.
Jordy married a fox-wife, I think. I do not recall her exactly.
“The hardest part,” he tells me, “is getting used to memories that no-one else has. Treasuring them, ‘cause they need to be treasured, without assuming that you’ve gone mad. You loved her most, so you remember. That’s the husband’s burden.”
And I would ask about his wife, if it would not pain him, for I’ve asked about her many times and I cannot keep her name straight in my head. There is something about her, as there is something about you, my love, that makes it difficult for those who weren’t lovers to recall her.
Once, while very, very drunk, Jordy offered some darker advice.
“The hardest part isn’t that everyone else has forgotten her,” he said. “It’s the dread, one day, that you’ll find another man who remembers every detail.”
I never asked him about this statement. I’ve never had the stomach. I cannot remember the woman he speaks of, so any comfort I offer is platitudes and conjecture.
But the fear of it sticks, like a knife to my gut. I can endure much, knowing I must endure it, but the thought you might have loved another wounds me beyond all measure.
I picture you there now, my sweet, my love, in the place beyond the brambles. Often I picture it, in my mind’s eye, a reminder of you and where you’ve gone. A reminder that, yes, you are most likely happy, certainly happier than I could make you in this worn down house, on the border between the fields and the forest and the thorns.
I imagine you on a throne, my love, because I would not care to see you otherwise. This way, at least, I can pretend your departure is as much about duty as anything else. I console myself with a greater good, even if it is one I cannot understand.
I imagine you on your throne in a dress of gold and black and green, ruling your apiary subjects with kind words and a smile that soothes the soul like honey in hot tea. I picture your court with its busy rulers and its stiff, unyielding guards.
In my mind’s eye, my love, my beloved, my only, I can see the rolling fields filled with clover. I can see the vast and endless hills covered in wildflowers.
This is the story I tell our daughter when she asks after her mother. You would not like it, my sweet, my love, but it comforts her more than science and truth. It comforts her more than tales of hives.
At least, it does for now.