Apiary at 2 A.M.

When the grid went dark, the towers exhaled and every window became a sealed lake. On the pharmacy roof, six painted boxes held a low gold weather no outage could touch.

I climbed with a flashlight wrapped in red cloth, so as not to bruise the workers' night. Their wings wrote soft commas in the warm air, editing panic out of the city.

Below us, traffic lights slept in their sockets, sirens moved by memory and guesswork. Above us, the bees kept reading the stars, turning black sky into coordinates of home.

By dawn, the first trams hummed back to life, coffee steam lifted from reopened doors. In each jar of amber on my kitchen sill a small sun waited, patient as breath.