What the Beekeeper Knows

She lifts the frame into the afternoon light, thirty thousand small fires suspended in comb, and does not flinch at the sound the hive makes— a low, colonial breathing, like a city that has agreed to live.

The suit is never enough. They find the seam at wrist, at throat. She stopped minding some year she can't place, when she understood that being entered is also a form of welcome, a proof you stood close enough.

Come October the colony begins its shrinking, draws inward to a winter cluster no larger than a fist, vibrating at the center, eating through what they stored back when the clover was stupendous and she was there with her smoke and her patience.

She seals the hive for the cold with newspaper and tape. She says nothing. She walks back across the field where the goldenrod is already gone to seed, carrying in her white gloves the smell of wax and the memory of wings.