Rooftop Apiary in January

Before dawn, the city is a stack of closed pianos. On the twelfth-floor roof, hives breathe through snow. Warmth hums inside them like coins in a pocket, small suns counting themselves against the dark.

The keeper lifts a lid; vapor rises, silver and slow. Bees move in deliberate commas over honeycomb, their bodies striped with streetlight and frost, as if night had written music on living wings.

Below us, buses kneel at red lights, doors sighing. Above us, a jet stitches one pale seam through cloud. Between those distances, the colony keeps speaking in a language of vibration, thrift, and heat.

By morning, the skyline turns amber at the edges. I taste one drop from the frame: cedar, smoke, rainwater. January loosens, almost imperceptibly, and the day opens like wax under a thumb.