In 2022, The New Yorker sent me a kind rejection for this piece, just a few words, but enough to stick. I’m excited to share this essay with you all.
Honey rosier than blood leaked from a beehive. Pollinated with marijuana, said the news. The government launched an investigation. As spring buds opened under a dome of blue, the bees they implanted flew. A map was drawn. Arrests made. When the agent told the networks, he thanked the Lord and the bees.
Two children bend over a blue kiddie pool. Little heads bob. The younger opens his palm, an orange worm twists like thread pulled from the belly of the earth. The older girl swivels her bony shoulders. Her eyes halo in chlorinated light. He laughs. She opens her mouth.
The search unfolds. The news creates and debunks its own theories in half-hour segments. The mother and father on air in t-shirts with stones for eyes. The investigation concludes the plausibility of the children alive is no longer a possibility. The effort ends in a televised moment of prayer. The amen rang out when the agent said what was left would become sea.
The town assumes them gone but keeps looking because the limelight holds them together in ways that will be misremembered as warmth. Facebook fundraisers expire. Weekend groups gather and then do not. First, a flood. Then, the bloom.
It is the scuba shop owner, diving under a full moon for sport, who finds them suspended in a furry tangle. Small entwined bodies, scavenged and flaking, save one toe with no nail.
The mother and father hold the wake at a bar down the street. The smell of urine from the night is masked beneath coconut essential oil and vanilla candles. Men in funeral jackets change into khaki shorts and palm dripping bottles. Women peel foil from puckered yellow domes in pastel dishes. Stools split open and stick to bare legs. Very little holds shape.
That morning, the town stood shoulder to shoulder. The mother and father carried two little trees with wrapped roots toward the south corner of the church. Fog steamed in pockets above the grass. They knelt facing each other, knees in dirt. Large dark birds with iridescent heads and long tails gathered on high oak branches. The father removed the orange ribbon from his tree. The mother removed from hers the green.
Beer brings the husband wide arcs of dream. He and his wife swim in the sea of a volcanic crater. Thick waves carry soot. The children lean over a sandcastle of orange marshmallow. Fistfuls of lava pass between them. Soft bodies shimmer in blurry light.
He’d dreamed their deaths before. When he was left hot and translucent, the sound of sleep from small mouths hummed him cool. Quiet, a fist wide and dry down his throat.
Thank you for reading. If this stayed with you, a single 🫧 Lava Drop helps keep the light on.
Jokes on them, they missed out on a perfect one
👏