Beekeepers

I awoke to the sound of Perdita's feet tiptoeing around my bedroom. Her tiny paws made soft patter noises on a thinly carpeted floor, and creaked in places where the wood beneath the old carpet aged and rotted. It sounded like rainfall on the roof of mom and dad's old house outside this city; mixed with a memory of the old swinging wood fence, it hummed like a melodic lullaby.

Mornings like those took me back to days of running around in a field of grass when the morning dew still clung to each blade and chilled my chubby child's legs as I trampled each one. It took me to days of finding the beehive in a shorter tree and sticking my chubby child's fingers in to steal the honey like Winnie the Pooh; it took me to early tearful lessons that Pooh cartoons tell nothing of bee stings. It took me back to hearing the distant whir of an old fan and picturing the bees swarming around my chubby child's cheeks and fierce stings that always lingered and made me shiver with quiet dread. It took me back.

I peeked through my drowsy eyelids to see raindrops dripping down the windowpane. Perdita pawed her way up to my pillow. Her paws made the sound of snow falling from rooftops onto snow-covered ground as she approached and pressed her belly's warmth against my cheek. The black and golden fluff that covered her small body roused me and tickled my forehead. I blinked her fur away from my eyes and scratched her ears.

"Dumb cat," I murmured as she craned her neck to lick my fingertips. "Don't you know I don't have any food for you?"

She meowed and licked my thumb. In the distance the early morning drivers hummed along moistened roads like busy morning bees.

Perdita belonged to David, my spotty apartment mate. David did everything and everything in between the everything he'd already done. Each month or so he came and went, always leaving behind some accidental mementos. This month's memory lay forgotten on the floor of our shared closet in the form of a clean white beekeeper's suit. David and I, after a night of cheap wine, expensive beer, and leftover pasta, decided to find out if the two of us could fit into this one over-sized beekeeper's suit. We woke up the next morning tangled limb-over-limb, each half-in and half-out of the suit. Two days later David took a plane to-Anyway, among the things he left behind I found a few ties, a pack of mint-flavored cigarettes, that beekeeper's suit that sometimes made me shiver, and Perdita.

I booted the cat from the pillow with a quick pat on her backside and climbed out of bed. Perdita meowed and pawed around as I threw on a black turtleneck and jeans. Slipping into David's old yellow raincoat, I soon stood outside in a musty old bus shelter waiting for the nine-fifteen. It came ten minutes late, as usual. The bus roared along side streets like thunder, but my wandering mind turned the angry sounds to little more than a gentle buzzing. I arrived at work with the rain pulsating down onto the silvery pavement and transposing the tarred streets into purring leaves of gold. All day I sat at a desk lost between the beauteous sheen of rain pouring down the dusty glass of a bus shelter and a half-smiled thought of waking in that bleached beekeeper's suit.

I remembered mom first coming home with a large honeycomb in her hands. Honey dripped down to her elbows and she wore a broad grin on her face as she handed it off to dad and told him to use a bit in his tea later. I remembered how she laughed. Her eyes squinted and her nose curled up, and tiny crow's feet surfaced across her face, and I watched her wash her hands in the leaky sink that always sputtered for about a minute before giving up any water. I saw the red splotches all over her hands, the spots where the stings clung in her flesh and unfettered their venom. She laughed so hard the tears rolled freely down her reddened cheeks. I looked at her red hands and tear-stained cheeks and shivered.

She told me about bee pheromones that compelled the bees to attack. I recalled the confusion in my first biology class when a teacher spoke of sexual pheromones and how I associated sex with painful bee stingers, and how mom laughed when I told her. I smiled, and the gentle air conditioner purred and chilled my damp skin.

Six o'clock came seven hours early that day. I remember forgetting to pick up my paycheck again because that Sunday the landlord's voice droned in my ear reminding me I was now four weeks behind on the lowest rent in the city.

That Friday I opened the door to the apartment and found David sitting in a chair in the beekeeper suit with Perdita on his lap. A package wrapped in black paper with yellow ribbon rested on a table by the door.

"Guess what I brought you," David said. Perdita meowed, and as rainwater dripped from my hair into my eyes I shivered and smiled.