Believe in Bees
short stories + more
Hi! Popping in for the first time in a while to share a short(ish) story I wrote this past month. The idea came to me after I saw a flyer on the street that just said ‘Believe in Bees’ and I thought what an incredible string of words it was. The idea snowballed and took on a life of its own.
This one took me a while so I hope you like it. If you don’t that’s ok, just don’t let me know.
🐝
BELIEVE IN BEES.
The last bee disappeared in early May. Anna the schoolteacher and her friend from the clinic saw its yellow and black coat drifting along the riverbank during lunch break, flitting between unplucked weeds. They said it looked sick.
The sighting was immediately reported to the council, who deemed it legitimate, and the pair documented it in the county scroll. Anna’s friend wrote in careful capital letters. Anna used cursive.
Ruby put it in her notebook too — red spiral-bound with a crooked cover and her initials spilling down the side. “One bee, riverbank, 12:40 p.m” She drew a small picture beside the entry as she always did; two wings, a blurred body, a dotted line for its imaginary flight path between the reeds and waterways. It had a cartoonish flair; big block letters streaking across the page.
Since then, the countryside had withered. Fields once brimming with corn and wildflowers held their breath, turning a sour purple. By midsummer, the smell of fermenting things had settled over the valley: in the soil, curtains and crops, rotting from root to tip.
Ruby watched it all from her farmhouse window, cataloging the decay as she always did. The world around her slowing its pirouette.
Even though she had only recently celebrated her 148th moon, she was old enough to notice that the air was hotter than it had been before, and that no one wanted to point out the change.
The bees were gone.
At first, her parents also tried to hide it. They painted the rose bushes a fresh coat of red and pantomimed mowing the lawn, pushing dead grass into patchy clumps at the corner of the yard. Ruby saw through it but understood they were the kind of people who didn’t know how to have a conversation. The type who would rather hand her silence and let her chart her own path to the truth.
The charade lasted a few months until, one morning, Ruby woke to find it all gone.
Roses plucked, dead grass removed, soil swirling in the morning breeze. Almost as if it never existed and the world had just always been dead.
She didn’t ask any questions, instead, retrieving her notebook from beneath the mattress and settling back at the bay window overlooking the lawn. The sun had caught itself on the trees, reflecting off the dew and illuminating the deteriorating brownscape into hues of deep yellow and fevered orange. She wrote it all down; the silence, the barren landscape, the morning light. She had learned by now that asking changed nothing.
Watching was the only thing that did.
. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁
It was now November. The seasons came and went slowly, then all at once, as they tend to do when the months get colder and the days get shorter.
It was the time of year in which Ruby woke most mornings with her teeth chattering, reaching in the dark for the wool blanket that belonged to her mother, and her mother’s mother before that. The fabric had gone soft in places, stiff in others, and smelled of someone she had never met. She used it every day, which felt like the right way to love something that wouldn’t last forever.
Lately though, something had settled in her mind; warm and ferocious. Every night she felt it sweeping through the streets of her dreams, setting the neighborhood on fire and leaving nothing but a giant mound of thick, soil-ridden ash in its wake. Most nights, she woke up in sweats clutching her hair, which somehow ended up unbraided, spread out across every inch of her pillow.
Tonight was like most, a rough dream had woken her and she couldn’t fall back to sleep without seeing towering dirt mounds pressing at the edges of the dark. She lay still for a moment, ceiling above her, heart slowing itself back down, then reached for the notebook from the bedside table.
She fingered through the pages slowly, until she landed on a particularly curious section. It had become ritual by now; reading back her thoughts in the dead of night, tracing her own handwriting.
She moved through the early entries first, when her parents had first gifted it to her. When the notebook was still thin and the entries were mostly weather, small observations and the names of birds she hadn’t learned yet.
She turned the pages more rapidly until she hit the bees.
Then the leaving.
This particular section was the names of people who left. Families who left. They went in the night, mostly. Here one evening and gone by morning, their trinkets still catching the light on windowsills and pots still on the stove.
It started close to the decline of the bees. At first she assumed they were simply leaving for somewhere better ,there were rumours that the coasts still had them, that if you went far enough east you could still hear the hum. She wasn’t sure she believed it.
The local press called it ‘the leaving’, and the name stuck the way they do when something mysterious happens. In whispers and letters.
Ruby cataloged them in a long list. Dates on the left margin of in. A small dash. The name. Then whatever she knew, which was usually very little.
Sonny had gone too. Ruby had known her since first grade; they had shared a desk, traded lunches, walked the long way home just to have more time to talk.
Then one morning, when she went to see her before school, her house was empty. Ruby stood at her gate for a few minutes as if Sonny might open the door and wave with a toothy grin, but was only met with an orchestra of crickets.
When Ruby had come home that evening she had waited for her parents to mention it. The empty house, the car gone, the lights all out. They must have noticed. Everyone noticed. But dinner came and went and neither of them said Sonny’s name, and Ruby understood that this was how it would be handled. The roses had been painted over.
Outside, the wind moved through the oak at the corner of the yard. She listened to it for a while, letting her heart fall in rhythm with the tree tapping at the window.
Then she turned to a fresh page, uncapped her pen, and wrote the date at the top. After that she didn’t stop. Thoughts, mostly, unformed things that only made sense in the particular logic of night.
The horrible dream on her hands. The dirt mounds. The names. She wrote until the thoughts thinned out, the pen slowed and the dark outside the window began to go grey at the edges.
When the shadow reached the bedpost she knew it was morning. She closed the notebook, set it on the nightstand, and sat for a moment with her hands in her lap, ink-stained to the second knuckle and sore to the wrist.
She felt around on the floor for the socks she’d thrown off in the night. It took a few tries, but she found them eventually, balled under the edge of the bed, and slipped them on quickly before her heels met the cold wood.
The room looked the same as it always did in the early morning. Grey light. the cold shape of her dresser in the corner. Then, from below her feet, the low clunk of a kettle; she always heard her mother before she saw her. As long as Ruby could remember she had a particular rhythm in the kitchen; the tap of the cast iron pan across the burner, the soft percussion of a drawer opened and nudged shut with a hip.
Ruby closed the notebook, anticipating a wake up call in approximately four and a half minutes. Two after the bacon started sizzling. She might as well get ahead of it.
As she rounded the bannister, she locked eyes with her mother. Ruby tried not to notice the fray of her hair and swollen eyes, moving her gaze to the table and the mismatched silverware.
“Breakfast is almost ready” she rasped, drying her hands on her apron and swirling the eggs in a small bowl.
Ruby nodded back, making note of dads slouch as he flipped through an old cooking magazine, settling at the stool next to him. He peered over the paper and his crooked glasses, taking her in for a moment just as she had; lingering on the undereye shadows.
“You look like something the cat dragged in,” he said.
Ruby looked at him flatly.
“We don’t have a cat,” she said.
He smiled into the magazine. “No I suppose we don’t.”
Ruby thought that she would like a cat. Something small and opinionated, with ideas about where to sit. A friend to keep pace with her and point out things to notice, though she knew cats didn’t really work that way. They showed up when they felt like it. Maybe that was fine. Maybe that was better.
Her mother set a plate in front of her. Eggs and toast. The corner piece.
“Eat up. Town hall’s at nine,” she muttered, scurrying back toward the sink.
The radio murmured to life in the background. Her father reached over and turned it up, just slightly. A man’s voice, formal and measured, came through. Ruby only caught a few short words through the static, “mandatory” and “concern”, before her dad turned the volume back down to a low hum.
At the final word, mother’s hand paused on the counter. Ruby caught the look that passed between her parents, quick and sharp like a blade. Her father’s jaw tightened, barely, and her mother turned back to the counter and resumed wiping a surface that was already clean.
Ruby picked up her fork in response.
“What exactly is a town hall,” she said, pronging her eggs.
“It’s when everyone who’s been thinking the same thing privately agrees to think it together, out loud, for an hour.” her father responded
“And then what?”
“And then they go home and think it over privately again.”
With no further questions, she went back to the plate, tackling the eggs first, then the toast, saving the corner piece for last the way she always did. The crumbs scattered carefully across the porcelain and she tried to spell her name, but only had enough material to write a large ‘U’.
When she finished, she carried her plate to the sink, rinsed it, and set it on the rack.
“I’ll meet you there” Ruby said to her parents, hoping they wouldn’t hear.
Instead, her father looked up from the magazine. Her mother turned off the stove.
“We’ll all go together,” she said, in a tone that wasn’t a suggestion.
“And your outfit is on the couch.”
. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁
The dress was a hideous explosion of purple florals. It had a Peter Pan collar and an overdrawn sash that tied at the back. It belonged, in Ruby’s opinion, to a different and lesser person. One who curtseyed and used an umbrella in the sun.
She knew it wasn’t worth the fight so she put it on anyway, smoothing it down in the mirror with a flat expression. She pinned her hair back with the small tortoiseshell clip her mother had left beside it, pulled on her black Mary Janes, both scuffed at the tip, and bunched her knee high socks at the calf.
Now, she looked exactly like something the cat dragged in.
She picked up her notebook from the nightstand and tucked it under her arm as a final accessory; the only thing she was wearing that was actually hers.
A cat, she thought, would never have let this happen.
. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁
Ruby had only been to the courthouse once, on a school field trip. They learned about the government and the things that came before the fall. How loud and how crowded it had all been. How uncertain of itself.
The world was much better now, they told her, pointing to facts and figures with red lines pointing up that were too small for her to read. The headlines plastered the walls, shouting at her; Crop yields, up 34%! Violent Crime, Down 94%!
The tour guide echoed the same sentiment with a pinned smile.
As usual, she had fastidiously taken notes and asked questions at the wrong times. The guide’s eyes narrowed each time her hand went up with the particular patience of someone who had not been expecting a child with a notebook and a list of follow-up questions.
Mrs. Planche, standing at the back with her hands clasped, had looked quietly proud that someone was paying attention at all.
The rest of the class trailed the guide in a loose cluster, their eyes glazed and forward-pointing, taking in nothing, which seemed to Ruby like a waste of a trip. They guide tracked the group with a steadiness that reminded Ruby of a farmer checking a fence line. Making sure nothing got out.
Now, as she stood outside the building again, she noticed the things she hadn’t before.
The masonry was crumbling at the corners. A thick crack ran the full length of the left column, thin as a hair but deep, disappearing into the foundation. Above the doors, the carved lettering had worn down to shallow divots and dashes resembling morse code.
She had just opened her notebook to detail the mess, when her parents caught up with her, and the crowd caught up with all of them. By the looks of it, everyone in town was there.
She saw kids from her class, grades above her, shopkeepers, saleswomen. All with a furrowed brow and a worried look. She opened her notebook to a fresh page and wrote the date then scribbled, “Line around the block” She paused, then added, “Nobody looks happy about it.”
“Put that thing away.” Her mother’s hand landed briefly on her arm, eyes moving around the crowd without settling on anything. Her voice was low, which meant she wasn’t asking.
Ruby capped her pen but kept the notebook under her arm. She crossed her hands behind her back and pressed the cap of the pen into the soft flesh of her palm. Hard enough for tears to well in her eyes, which she blinked away before they could become anything. She held the pressure for three counts, then released.
Around her, the line swelled.
As courthouse doors creaked open, the line snaked into the mouth fast, pressing forward with a quiet urgency. Ruby stayed close to her parents, one hand brushing her father’s sleeve as they walked through the threshold.
The foyer smelled of damp wool, old wood and something underneath. Something mineral, like soil after rain. The ceilings were higher than she remembered, but the same posters from the field trip still lined the walls. She noticed, though some had curled at the corners and one had come half away from its fixing, hanging at an angle. “Life expectancy — climbing” tilted toward the floor.
Her father steered them toward the middle of the room with a hand at her mother’s back. Ruby settled between them as the rest of the crowd piled in behind her, filling the rows and lining the walls until the room felt small.
The podium at the front stood empty, lit by a single lamp of yellow light. Whoever was coming hadn’t arrived yet, but the room was already arranged around their absence.
She looked up to ask her parents when it would start, but when she caught their gaze she saw they were both already transfixed by the lighting. She looked around. The rest of the crowd was the same; faces forward, shoulders still.
Kids littered the floor, not unlike Ruby, looking around in confusion at their parents like watching a storm swell roll in over the horizon. Ruby silently uncapped her pen behind her back, away from her mother’s gaze, and wrote blind, feeling for the page by touch. “Moths and flame”
At that moment she heard a door creak from behind the stage and the council filed in. There were nine of them, ranging in shapes and sizes, wearing ceremonial cloaks that fit with varying degrees of tailoring. Some too long, dragging at the heel, others straining at the shoulder and bunching under the armpit.
One was not like the others.
She sat slightly apart, her headpiece tall and elaborately constructed, her dress more ornate than the cloaks around her. She wore bright, overdrawn lipstick that gave the impression of a blooming flower. As she looked around she did not look at anyone’s face, her gaze was centered at the middle distance with a blank expression, as though the crowd were just a mirror.
Ruby focused on the woman’s lips. She imagined the black space between them erupting, vines unfurling from her throat, curling around her neck, reaching for the front row, cracking the windows. She saw the whole room swallowed by something green and alive and indifferent.
She blinked. The woman’s lips remained closed.
As she focused on the faces of the rest, she realized she recognized some of them.
Toward the left was the woman from the bakery, who made the good rye and always gave Ruby the heel without being asked. There was the man who fixed the generators on the east road, and the older woman who ran the community library.
And then, behind all of them, stumbled in a man who did not match.
Glasses slightly crooked, shirt half tucked, he carried a briefcase with papers sticking out at the corners and walked quickly with his eyes down. He also wasn’t looking at the crowd, but in a different way than the woman.
The rest of the council parted, allowing him through, then closed behind him as they settled into their seats along the stage. The red-lipped woman’s chair sat several inches higher than the rest, elevated on a small platform. It gave the impression that she was large enough to squash the others if she shifted her weight. But she didn’t move at all.
The man reached the podium and set his briefcase down with a soft clap that carried across the whole room. He adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat.
“Good morning,” he said. His voice was quieter than Ruby expected for a man at a podium.
“We know there have been concerns about the” He paused, shuffling a single page in front of him, ” — “bees.”
Someone in the third row coughed.
“The council has brought me here today as an independent expert in ecological recovery and seasonal pollinator cycles,”
“I want to reassure you that what we are experiencing is not without precedent.”
Behind him, red lip woman pursed her face and scrunched, just slightly, before letting the cool smile settle thinly back over her face. Ruby couldn’t tell if it was confusion or anger. Maybe both.
“Bees have disappeared before. They have always come back. This is a cyclical pattern, well documented, going back centuries. A natural correction. The colony rests. The colony returns,” reading the last part faster than the others.
“There is every reason for optimism.’”
Ruby wrote it all down. She underlined every reason and put a question mark beside it. Then she looked at the council. They sat in a perfect, unmoved row behind him.
The man offered a few more stuttering statements about figures and timelines, colony collapse rates, recovery windows, percentage points that seemed to contradict each other.
As he finished, he still did not look up at the crowd. He gathered his papers slowly, tapping them against the podium to straighten them, and turned toward the door.
Right before he could reach the knob, a voice echoed from the front row: “And what about the families?”
Ruby stood on her toes to see where it came from. A man in a baseball cap, broad-shouldered, with a mustache that took up most of his face. He was standing with his arms crossed, not aggressive, but planted.
“The Hendersons. The Marsh family. The Okafor kids. You want to talk about cycles, talk about that. Where did they Go.”
A murmur moved through the room like a current. Ruby felt her mother’s hand find her shoulder. “’And what about those that make a living from Bees,” The mustache man continued, louder this time, his cap pushed back on his head. “The farmers. The orchards. Your cycles and your recovery windows don’t pay anyone’s bills. What are we supposed to do in the meantime?”
A few people near him nodded. Then the red-lipped woman rose.
She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to. The simple image of her, the headpiece, her still composure as she surveyed the room, was enough to pull the murmur flat. She waited until it was completely silent. Then waited a few more moments.
“This community,” she said, her voice low and cavernous, “has endured a great deal.”
“We are here because we care. Because we are committed. Because the work of recovery, real recovery, requires patience, and trust, and the wisdom to know that some questions are best answered with time.”
She smiled.
“What we can offer today, is a beginning.” She gestured to the side of the stage, where two officials Ruby hadn’t noticed before were already moving through the rows, each carrying a small wooden crate. “Seeds. Selected specifically for this soil, this valley, this moment. We ask that you plant them in the ground closest to your home. Test the earth. Tend to it.” Another pause. ‘
“The bees follow the flowers. We give them something to come back to.”
The officials moved quietly and efficiently, pressing small paper packets into outstretched hands. Ruby watched them work. Nobody had asked for seeds. Nobody refused them either.
Her mother accepted one without looking at it. Her father turned his over once, then held it at his side.
Ruby looked at the packet in her mother’s hand. Plain paper, no label, sealed with a small wax circle the same deep red as the woman’s lips. Along the bottom, in small neat print: Report any sprouts to your nearest council office
The red-lipped woman sat back down
“We thank our expert for his time,” she said, then nodded once to the row beside her and the council rose in unison. They filed back toward the door behind the stage in the same order they had arrived; cloaks trailing, faces forward, unhurried.
The red-lipped woman went last. At the threshold she paused, one hand on the doorframe, and turned to survey the room a final time. Not searching for anything. More like counting.
The way you’d run a finger down a list.
. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁
As the crowd filed into the corridor out of the courtroom, people got their breath back, voices rising to a normal register for the first time all morning. They held the seed packets and talked about where they would plant them, some discussing the south-facing beds because of their natural sunlight while others argued for the soil near the town creek.
She fell into step beside her mother, eyeing the seed packet still in her hand. “Are you going to plant those?”
Her mother looked down at the packet as though she had forgotten she was holding it. She closed her fingers around it.
“Did you know those families?” Ruby tried again. “The ones the man mentioned. The Hendersons.”
Her mother’s jaw tightened the same way her father’s had at the radio that morning. “Not now, Ruby.”
“But —”
“Not now.”
That’s when she noticed her mom’s face. Pale. She looked over at her father. He was walking with his hand in his pocket, shoulders wound up around his ears. Tense.
They continued to move through the crowd on autopilot, her father’s hand at her mother’s back the same way it had been all morning, steering without speaking. Ruby stayed close, one hand nearly brushing her mother’s sleeve, carried along in the wake of the town.
Then a piece of fabric caught her eye.
A flash of it, deep and ornate, disappearing around the mouth of a long hallway branching off from the main entrance. One of the council women serpentined across the long hallway, not the red-lipped woman, but one of the others, moving quickly away from the crowd.
She looked back at her parents. They were already three people ahead, neither of them turning. The crowd closed between them like water.
She decided to follow the fabric.
As she pulled away and swam upstream through the current of bodies and rustling coats, she kept her eyes fixed on the flash of cloak at the end of the hallway, afraid that if she looked away for even a moment it would be gone and she would be standing alone in a corridor with nothing but ink-stained fingers.
When she reached the end of the hallway, she found a flight of stairs leading down, narrow and unlit except for a thin seam of light at the bottom. She stood at the top for a moment, one hand on the wall, listening, catching small pieces of conversation. Low and indistinct. Buzzing.
She followed the noise, going down one step at a time, the air getting cooler with each descent. She expected the wooden stairs to creak at her foot, but the warped wood kept quiet; granting her silence. At the bottom, the hallway turned into a long maze of doors. Each had a small plaque on the front, chiseled with what Ruby could only assume were the council members last names.
There was a small light coming from the final door, which was slightly ajar. She shimmied along the hallway and pressed herself against the wall until she could see just enough through the slit.
The red-lipped woman had her back to her and the other council member stood opposite, head bowed. They were speaking too low for Ruby to catch the words, but she understood the cadence. Serious and brief.
The red-lipped woman reached into her dress and produced a folded piece of paper. The woman took it. Unfolded it slowly, read it once, then again. Her face did not change expression exactly, but something in it settled. She nodded once, a small and solemn dip of the chin. Then she bent slightly and tucked the paper into her shoe, pressing it flat against the inside of her heel with two fingers. She straightened, smoothed her cloak, and that was that.
Except it wasn’t.
As she took her first step away, the paper slipped. A quiet thing, barely a sound, just the soft tick of folded paper meeting flagstone. Neither woman looked down. They were already moving in opposite directions, footsteps fading into the dark toward another room beyond Ruby’s eyeline.
Silence settled back over the floor and everything sat still, as if nothing had actually ever happened in this hallway before.
Ruby counted to three. She thought about the stairs, the corridor, her parents somewhere in the crowd above her. She counted to three again. Then she slid through the crack, pushing the door slightly wider with her shoulder, and moved to where they had been standing.
The paper lay exactly where it had fallen. She crouched, picked it up between two fingers, and unfolded it carefully.
Shacks Field. 7pm. 11th moon.
As she read the note, something settled in the pit of her stomach and spread slowly upward, the way cold water rises.
The 11th moon was only three nights away. And Shacks Field was barely a mile from her farmhouse. She had known it her whole life as one of the places that was always at the edge of things. It had been abandoned for years. Decades, maybe, and in all her exploring, She had never gone in. She had written it in her notebook once, under a section titled places, with no further annotation. Just the name and a small question mark.
She opened her notebook, copying the note down in uneven letters, pressing too hard in some places, barely touching the page in others.Once she finished, she folded the paper exactly as she had found it and placed it back on the floor where it had fallen. She couldn’t risk anyone knowing she had seen the paper.
Then she turned and ran.
The stairs came up faster than they had gone down. She took them two at a time, one hand slapping the wall for balance, and burst back into the hallway at the top just as —
“Ruby.”
Her father. Arms crossed, standing exactly where the hallway met the main corridor. Her mother two steps behind him, coat already buttoned, face unreadable.
“Where have you been.” Not a question.
“I got turned around,” she said. “The crowd —”
“We’re leaving,” he said, grabbing her arm. Her mother’s hand found her shoulder, firm and heavy. The main doors were ahead, and the cold beyond them, and the long silent drive home.
In the car, Ruby sat in the back and watched the fields pass. Neither of them said anything. In her experience that was always the more serious version. Yelling would have meant there was still something to negotiate.
She pressed her thumbnail into her palm and counted to four. Then she opened her notebook to the shaky entry and stared at it the whole way home.
Three nights. She had watched the fields go sour over months and said nothing. Paused as her friends and neighbors leave without warning.
She had waited her whole life for something to be worth following into the dark.
Three nights was nothing.
. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁
As it turns out, time passes quickly when you give it something to do.
She started with the seeds. Her mother had left the packet on the windowsill without comment, and Ruby took that as permission. She tried the soil along the garden first, but it came up in clumps, dark and rust-colored. She worked it with her fingers anyway, pressing each seed to the same depth, spacing them the width of her thumb apart. When she finished, she went inside, taped the empty packet to a fresh notebook page, and recorded everything beneath it — soil colour, depth, spacing — in her smallest hand. She kept the remaining packets sealed on the page beside it, their red wax circles unbroken, and decided she would wait to see what the first ones did before she asked anything more of the earth.
She slept. She ate. She helped her mother in the kitchen without being asked, which made her mother look at her sideways but say nothing. She dried dishes and swept the back step and carried wood in from the lean-to, counting the logs in her head until she reached a number she didn’t know.
On the second day she found a spider constructing a web between a pipe and a dead branch. She crouched and watched it for a long time.
By the third day, she had assembled a small backpack of things. Quietly, without ceremony or ritual. The bundle contained her notebook, two pencils, the small torch from the drawer in the utility room that nobody used, a piece of wax cloth she found folded at the back of the linen cupboard and a short length of cord.
By afternoon, she had stolen her mother’s county map, sneaking it out of her dresser while she lounged in the yard. Ruby spread it across her room and traced the route with her finger. Down the back lane past the Alderton place, left at the field boundary where the fence had rusted through, along the long track until the broken gate. in total, a mile, perhaps a little more.
Twenty minutes at a normal pace. Fifteen if she moved with purpose. She folded the map along the same creases and put it in her bag.
It would come in handy tonight.
. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁
She waited until the house fell into a heavy, hollow silence, before slipping out of bed into the velvet air. She pulled on her dark blue sweater, the wool scratching faintly at her wrists, and paused with one hand on the bedpost, watching the dark casts from the trees ebb and flow across the floorboards.
Ruby moved like a shadow, her boots in one hand and her bag in the other, feeling the floorboards shift, but not quite creak, beneath her weight. Overhead, her father’s rhythmic snores folded into the ceiling, dulled and distant. The sound waned and waxed as she moved farther down the hall, until it dissolved completely when she slipped out the back door, leaving the lull behind.
Outside was darker than she’d imagined. With the moon swallowed by clouds, the fields were reduced to shape alone. Low, endless, and black. The air was thick with that familiar, cloying rot, sweet and swollen. She took a shallow breath, as though the smell might settle inside her, but instead, the smell caught on her throat and burned.
She pulled out the map, smothering a cough and smoothing its creases with her thumb to remind herself of the geometry of her escape: past the Alderton place, through the fence gap, and into the belly of the woods. She folded it again, smaller this time, and crinkled it into her pocket.
It was time.
Her steps felt longer in the dark. Every snap of a dry cornstalk sounded like a gunshot in the airless valley. She passed the Alderton place; it sat like a carcass in the dark, windows staring out like empty eye sockets, the paint peeling away in long, dead strips. When Ruby was young, the house had been a pale pink, but nature had shed its skin until only the white bones persisted. She stopped for a second, closing her eyes and willing the structure back to vibrancy. When she opened them, the house remained hollow before her.
She pinched her leg and kept moving.
At the fence gap, the rusted wire gave a low, reluctant groan as she squeezed through. It snagged her sweater at the hip. She froze, listening—counting her breath—then yanked herself free and stumbled forward into the treeline.
The woods didn’t rustle. Their bones seemed to have forgotten how to be supple; branches stiff and interlocking like skeletal fingers. As she pushed deeper into the belly of the forest, the smell changed. The rot vanished, replaced by a sweet scent. A dense, artificial nectar that clung to the back of her throat and made her stomach turn..
Then the ground began to change.
At first it was subtle; a short rise where there should have been none. Then another. Small, rounded humps in different sizes interrupting the flatness of the forest floor. Some mounds were shallow and wide, others narrow, almost tapered, as though something beneath them had settled unevenly. A few had slight indentations at one end—collapsed pockets where the soil dipped inward before rising again. One looked jointed, the curve broken in two places
Ruby slowed, crouching slightly as her eyes adjusted. There were more than she’d expected. Dozens.
She waded through them, stepping carefully at first, then less carefully as the ground kept rising and falling beneath her feet. She moved faster without deciding to. The mounds were closer together now, less space between them, and she found herself stepping over rather than around, her boots sinking slightly at the crown of each one before the soil held.
The sweet smell was stronger here. It felt like something she had breathed before, in the place between sleeping and waking. In the part of the horrible dream she could never quite bring back with her.
A mound caught her boot at the ankle and she stumbled, one hand going down into the soil to catch herself. The earth was warm, holding the day’s heat. She sucked in a breath to steady herself, catching a flash of movement at the treeline. A torch. Between the trees. Close enough that she could see the flame shiver in the wind.
She stayed flat, cheek against the soil, heart loud in her ears. Then, the trees gave up their dark with strokes of orange and yellow.
Another torch. Then another. Then many. Too many to count.
It was the council, still in their cloaks, moving in a slow and practiced line. As they walked, each dropped a torch into the soil, rooting it into the ground until it stood on its own. At the front of the procession was the red lipped woman, her face covered by a black veil, the blood red shade still piercing through the sheer lining.
Their footsteps made no sound except the soft displacement of leaves underfoot, the sweet smell thickening in the air around them. They passed close enough that Ruby could hear breathing. It was only when the procession had almost fully passed that she fully looked up.
At the center of the procession, flanked by two figures in dark cloaks, was the man in the baseball cap. The one from the courthouse. Ruby couldn’t remember his name but she felt like it began with a J or a K. She feverishly scribbled down both letters
He wasn’t walking so much as being walked. His cap was gone. His head was down. His face, what she could see of it, had the blankness of a person who had screamed everything they had and arrived somewhere on the other side of it. Quiet. Absence.
The mustache that had filled most of his face looked smaller out here, in the dark, without the room around it.
Ruby dragged herself behind the widest tree she could find and did not breathe.
She watched them bring him to a large mound in the centre of the clearing. The council arranged themselves around it in a circle, cloaks pooling at their feet, torches planted in the ground at even intervals. The red-lipped woman took her place at the head of the circle, her back straight.
Then they began.
It started low. So low Ruby felt it in her sternum before she heard it with her ears. A single note, held in unison, that seemed to come from somewhere below language. It built slowly, each voice finding the others, until the sound was less like singing and more like the forest itself resonating at a frequency it had been waiting to produce. The sweet smell thickened. The torches bent inward.
It went on for she didn’t know how long. Time had stopped behaving the way it usually did. She had no count, no system, no shadow on a bedpost to anchor her. There was only the sound, and the torches, and the mounds breathing in the dark around her. At some point she stopped writing and simply held the pen against the page, the ink bleeding onto the paper and pooling at the corner.
After a while the hum dulled, replaced by blanketed silence. The red-lipped woman walked to the front of the mound, head up, smiling and faced the man. She raised both arms high, reaching toward the tip of the horizon, shaking, and nodded.
All at one, the council swarmed forward as one, cloaks merging in the dark, forming one hive.
Ruby didn’t write what happened next, but she watched it all through her fingers pressed against the tree bark.
When it was done they placed him in the mound with a vacancy that was somehow worse than the ceremony. The soil moved easily, as though it had been waiting.
Ruby had stopped breathing without noticing. She became aware of it only when her lungs insisted, a slow careful exhale through her nose that she tried to make take as long as possible. She shifted her weight, just slightly, just enough to ease the ache in her knee that had been pressed against a root — and reached slowly for her notebook. Her elbow caught on a root with a slight tear.
The sound was nothing. A whisper. Less than a whisper.
But the red-lipped woman turned.
She didn’t scan the treeline the way a person searches. Her head turned with the slow deliberateness of someone who already knows exactly where to look, gazing directly at Ruby. Her eyes in the torchlight were yellow. Still. Patient.
Ruby ran.
She ran the way she had come until her lungs burned. Through the fence gap, past the Alderton place, down the lane. The dark that had felt manageable on the way out felt entirely different on the way back. Her boots were too loud. The fields were too open.
She didn’t look behind her because she had decided, somewhere in the sprint, that looking behind her was the one thing she absolutely could not do. She came through the back door and stood in the kitchen with her hand on the counter, breathing.
It was only then that she noticed her hands. Empty.
She stood very still for a moment, replaying the run in her mind the way she replayed everything in order, step by step, looking for the exact moment she had lost the notebook.
The treeline. The sprint.
She had dropped it somewhere in the dark. She didn’t know where. Somewhere between the tree and the fence gap, somewhere in the field, somewhere among the mounds. She put both hands flat on the counter and looked at them for a long time. Ten fingers. No ink stains. Nothing to show for any of it.
She went to her room and got into bed with her boots still on. She lay on her back and looked at the ceiling and told herself, in careful and specific language, that she had misread it. The mounds were natural. She closed her eyes and willed a dream, any dream, even the fire, even the ash ,something to pull her under and away.
In the dark she saw the woman’s face. glowing yellow. Like sulfur.
She closed her eyes harder. Then harder still, until the dark behind them had colours in it, until she could almost convince herself that the shadows moving at the edges of her room were just the trees outside. Just the ordinary night doing what nights do.
Then she heard the front door click. Not a dream.
She blindly reached for her notebook, grasping air as she remembered it sat in the woods.
From downstairs, a muffled, hissed argument. A woman’s voice replied, hot and stinging. Then came a scream, followed by a thud.
She recognized her mother’s voice, a long, jagged sound that cut through the farmhouse walls until it was silenced, replaced by that low, vibrating hum.
Ruby pressed her fingernails into the floorboards, counting upward, and did not let go until she was pulled.
. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁
The mounds were everywhere now. The team was slowly cleaning them up, cataloguing, measuring, marking each one with a small orange flag before moving to the next. It was slow work. There were more than anyone had expected.
He sighed, turning the red spiral-bound notebook over in his hands. The cover was crooked, the initials “R” spilling down the side in fading ink. Sam found it during what remained in the town. Since then, the woods had been converted and converted again, its purpose slowly softened into storage, despite seeing several lives; infantry, chicken coop, pantry.
He flipped to the last entry. Beneath a cartoonish drawing of a winged creature with a dotted flight path, two small, translucent packets were taped to the paper. They looked like seed packets, but there was no brand. He ripped them off and pocketed them.
The rest of the book read like a fable.
There were lists of names, tallies of absences, diagrams of places that no longer existed. Repeated references to ‘bees’ appeared throughout; small, flying, numerous. Black and yellow.
The notebook was catalogued and stored with other unverifiable materials.
Later when the light dulled and the air cooled, Sam passed an unused strip of land and, scattered a handful of seeds into the dirt. He didn’t know why. Nothing had stuck in years.
The soil was dry and broke apart in his hands like old bread. He pressed the seeds down anyway, covering them carefully.
Weeks later, the flowers grew because they could, thin and unspectacular, bending without sound, breaking immediately. There was no movement around them, no hovering or hum. The workers watched for days, then weeks, and then stopped watching.
The flowers did not seem to mind.
END.