2.4.19
It was while the orchard keeper’s wife was showing him the hive that Luca first felt the buzzing in his head. At first he assumed it was the bees themselves who were making the sound, but it was different, higher than the bees’ almost bored-sounding drone. Earlier that spring, Samuel had stolen their father’s pistol. Despite his brother’s protests, Luca had stubbornly followed Samuel into the woods by the old doctor’s cottage, far from where their parents were busy hacking at the still-frozen soil in the field. Luca had seen the gun flash in his father’s hands before, but here in the cold light of the clearing, it was duller than he remembered. Samuel gripped the wooden handle with both hands, pointed the nose at a jay in a bare elm branch, and clicked the trigger into an explosion of feathers. As Luca watched them float to the forest floor, he heard the same ringing he was hearing now.
The orchard keeper’s wife was carefully lifting one of the hive’s wooden panes out of its grooves, revealing a flurry of striped bodies, legs and wings darting across its shimmering tessellation. She was saying something, but Luca couldn’t hear her. The trees and the grass at the edges of his vision had started to shimmer, too, joined by a pulsating throb somewhere behind his eyes. Then, as quickly as it arrived, the buzzing left. It reminded Luca of the time he had tried drawing, in the margin of one of his mother’s novels, a pair of buttocks. The result had left something to be desired,. Still, Luca had panicked, and frantically rubbed at the drawing with his fist until it formed a gray smear that was somehow more unsettling than what was there before.
Thanks for reading, more next week. (And fuck Tom Brady!)