Dennis blew clouds of precious mammalian warmth into the frozen night air. As usual, his engine took three or four times to turn over, and it spurted out a chunk of phlegm upon this awakening jolt. How sweet, it was imitating its owner.
Watching the ice crystals form on his windshield, he said his daily reminder prayer, the one that helped his foot find the gas pedal and his steering wheel find the Taco Shack:
Oh sweet Lord, thank you for my life. Thank you for caring for my mother’s spirit. Thank you for Glory and all the love she brings to the world. Thank you for this opportunity to learn humbly in your service. Thank you for this abundance so that I may afford health insurance. Thy will be done. Amen.
Having coaxed his chariot into forward motion, the gentle giant crept along in the crunching ice toward his nighttime employment. Arriving at the Taco Shack exactly at the moment his heater kicked in, Dennis chuckled, patted the dash, and prepared to meet the overnight shift. Here is what we are willing to go through in this day and age. Here is what we call forward progress, upward mobility. Free burritos until dawn and a bonus every paycheck for doing what no one else wanted to do!
This night, in an unscheduled urge of sheer compassion, Dennis let himself sit in the car for a few minutes with the heater on. He just sat still for a blessed moment. It was weird. But he let it happen.
Sure enough, the feels came to be felt. And he sat still for it. Breathing, and warm, and alone.
Nothing was ever happening at the Taco Shack. It seemed his job was generally to make sure this was true. And so, it seemed: nothing happened. He was there, things moved around, but nothing was actually happening.
The hollow sound of that feeling reverberated through his chest. Dennis closed his eyes and let his head rest forward on the steering wheel. No one would see him in this defeated slump, in a frigid dark place where nothing was happening.
Nothing was happening.
Happening. Like last month, somehow years ago, before the Frozen Fog hit, when tiny Glory had come strolling home from school with a handful of what looked like glitter and puffballs. As she came closer, Dennis noticed the handful was moving around in her little paws. When she really landed, beaming one of those Mother Goose smiles that made her eyes go all cartoony, it was clear what she had in her hands. Bees. The kid had a handful of fifty-some perfectly happy honeybees crawling around the holy grail of her cupped hands. The bees seemed huge, tame, and totally unphased.
These bees, Glory explained, were found inside the school cafeteria, having swarmed when the weather turned, hiving up in the speech team’s multi-tiered State Champion trophy.[1] The bees had come from the school greenhouse project, most likely, though how they got into the trophy case no one knew for sure. (“Very carefully,” Marma had said.) They had been discovered that September afternoon by an overzealous lunchroom monitor who had been lingering nearby looking for something to make wrong and fix. She had been lucky in her duties; she found the hive, promptly making it very, very, scarily Wrong and showing up with drama, squall, and fanfare to have it Fixed. The teachers and custodians that gathered had been hellbent on calling the authorities to get the bees removed, when Morning Glory Maycomb walked up gently, quietly, undisturbingly, and, tugging on the sleeve of her favorite custodian (the one who had gotten her math book off the roof when some idiot jerks had thrown it there) she declared her intention to manage the bees herself.
Now, the entire team would have shoo-shooed her and/or patted her on her naïve little head, had it not been for the principal, Ms. Vouvray, who harbored not only a profound respect for the diversity of individual specialties and aptitudes, but also a personal liking for her daughter’s best friend. With a shrewd eye, she recalled that Glory had led the honeybee project in the school garden, which had been a glowing success and Ms. Vouvray’s first witness of a child so unafraid of bees as to let them crawl in her ears. In an act of staggeringly gentle authority, as was her specialty, the principal had singlehandedly pacified the lot of teachers and the concerned maintenance team, assuring them she would personally oversee the safety of the lunchroom throughout the entire bee removal process.
“It was a piece of cake, Dad,” Glory had said, holding the evidence in her delighted hands, spreading the spacious pearls of her smile. “I called to them first, asked them to sing me a little song that I could sing back to them. They did, and it went like this: Buzz-buzz bzzzzzzzah! Buzz-buzz bzzzzzzzahzzzzzzzzahzzzzzzz Ahzzzzzzz Bzzzzzzzzzz!”
Dennis had grinned indulgently, giving the song ample room to exist. It wasn’t “got a beat, you can dance to it” good, but it had a certain live-jazz quality, so he nodded in time.
Glory was blasting along, “And then, so I sang it, and then we were singing together, and it was just the same, and they let me walk up and open the glass and carry out the trophy without disturbing a second of the music! I told them in my mind that we were going to have to move so they didn’t get hurt, and they said they would trust me. We just kept going Buzz-buzz bzzzzzzzah! Buzz-buzz bzzzzzzzah! all the way out the door, and then Ms. Vouvray closed the school door behind us so no bees could come back in.”
“Wow, MG. You’re made of magic, kid. So…” Dennis, enjoying the story, was still standing in front of a child with a handful of bees. He tried to adult without rushing. “So where did you put them next?”
“I know, that’s what I was worried about, right? Because they had left their bee box for a reason. I think they didn’t like having two queens. But so we were walking, Ms. Vouvray and me, and one of the bigger fluffier bees came out of the trophy and buzzed around my head a bunch. I had to take deep breaths to hear what it was saying, but it wanted me to go over to the big oak tree across from the playground, so I did. And guess what was there!” She dropped her voice on the last sentence emphatically, confiding a sacred secret to the man she called father.
“What? A flower. A honeypot? A little yellow bear.”
“Nooo!” Glory giggled, shaking her beefull hands, causing a few of her fluffballs to sputter out and buzz around in excited circles.
Dennis backed up a few steps despite himself. (Dadcode: no fear. Make it look like exaggerated interest. Smile, blink, raise voice.) “What, then?”
“It was a big hole! A big, deep tree hole up high! So Ms. Vouvray held me up to the tree and I put the trophy sideways in there so they could fly around and make their new home. It was the perfect size for them, because I had to put my hand in to fish the trophy back out. And it was… warm. It was warm like a cinnamon bun. And buzzy with happiness.”
“Well, I don’t think those bees wanted to live in y’alls trophy case any more than those teachers wanted them there. Nice one, Glory!”
She stood there grinning, squealing every time the furry little buzzers crawled over the sensitive parts of her hands and arms. Dennis watched and waited for more, but no further information was offered. At last he could not hold it: “So, how in the… What…” (Steady, now, Cooldad: don’t hit all the alarms.) “I mean, why did you come home with a handful of your friends?”
“Oh, Dad. They came with me! A whole bunch of them flew after me when I left the tree, and Ms. Vouvray didn’t see, so I sat down and shared my apple juice with them. It was still in my coat pocket from lunch. And there were so many of them, they had a hard time sharing when it was in the juice box, right? So I poured it into my hands. They liked that. And then school was almost over, so…”
“Soooo?” Dennis batted his eyes at her like a gossipy teenager.
“Well, I didn’t go to my last class. I sat and talked to the bees instead.”
“MG.”
“I know, I know! But I was dismissed by the principal!” The sagacious child almost, almost took on the tone of a whiny door hinge, but only due to the sudden memory of her first and only grounding.
Dennis was hardly disturbed, maybe because of the lame logic of justification, maybe because of the affect that a child with beehives for hands had on his openness to non-normative experiences.
“Okay so, let me guess: then they told you they wanted to come home with you, and here they are. You just scooped ’em into your hands like pebbles, huh?”
“No!” Glory giggled, relieved for the welcome space to keep telling the truth. “They crawled into my hands on their own. One by one. And we walked home.”
Raised eyebrows. Pursed lips. Squinty eyes.
“Really!” she exclaimed. “They’d already gotten used to it with the apple juice. I told them it would be safe for them to travel that way, and they went with it. Well, most of them, and then lots of them liked to swirl around me as we went. But they all came along! We just kept on singing the Buzz song!”
And Dennis again remembered how much he loved this small human.
“So. I see. Now: what exactly are you planning to do with them, O Beekeeper?”
“Oh, Dad!” Glory laughed. “I wouldn’t have let them come if I didn’t have a plan!”
“Oh, good. You have a plan.” Dennis felt the muscles of his jaw go tight, despite his general trust for the eleven-year-old.
“Okay, look. The bees in the tree had swarmed into the trophy from the bee box. I think they swarmed because there were so many of them so fast, and then they had to have been in the trophy case for at least a few weeks because they had a new queen already. These bees are a second swarm split from the first swarm, which seemed safe because it was pretty big and had plenty of drones and nurses.”
“Nurses?” Dennis repeated absently. In truth, he had just chosen a moment to accentuate a safe word, so that he could calm his nervous system from hearing the word “swarm” so many times in a row.
“Right, the ones that help the larvae grow up.”
Mm, larvae. Not better. Dennis decided to stop asking questions and just wear the listening face for as long as he could. Lotta eye-blinking and nodding. “Right. Go on.”
Go on she did. “So, I figured if the first bees had swarmed–” Blinking, nodding. “–then the hive might have other swarms in mind too–” Continue breathing. “–and so I went to the bee box and found a new little swarm cell hanging down–” Ugh, the addition of “cell.” Wince. Blink. Nod. “–and so I very carefully pulled it off, with the help of the bees, of course–” Of course. “–and then I asked my mini-swarm if they could raise this queen, and they said yes, and so then we all walked home together!”
Glory was beaming, as a child making a book report on a story she clearly adored [2]. She was resolute, calmly stating facts. She looked at him as if they had arrived together some obvious conclusion. Dennis failed to see the plan, but that was possibly due to the sweat running in his eyes. He took a long moment to pat his face with his t-shirt, gathering the resources to navigate toward proper fatherly participation. When he looked up again, nothing had changed; Morning Glory, Buzz song, handcups, mini-swarm. Realizing he was out of his element completely, Dennis had chosen the only fatherly action available to him; he bowed. He had become accustomed to the kid knowing more than him [3]. MG was actually literally training as a beekeeper, and he, Dennis, had been terrified of bees for as long as he could remember. It was clear to him who would call the shots on this one. He cleared his throat and made homage to the Beekeeper: “Well, where are you going to put them? And what do you need if you’re gonna take care of them here?”
Morning Glory would have cartwheeled across the yard, had she not been holding dozens of bees. Instead she squealed into a joyful whoop and wiggled head to toe. The beecup remained somehow undisturbed. Dennis registered that he had bowed to the proper Queen. She spoke: “Oh Dad. I’m so happy you asked. I already thought about this, the whole way home. There’s a perfect spot behind the garage. I told them we had to ask you first. Come on, I’ll show you!”
Dennis had stood still for a moment to watch her bound off in that direction. Steady, clear, purposeful, and confident in her gifts. For just that moment, there was a lightning-strike of recognition: this is the kid he raised. This is how she is. Something he was doing was working, and working really well. More salty water gathered in his eyes, this time without sting.
“By the way, I had a dream just like this, except it was llamas, not bees, and I was huge. Oh yeah,” MG had turned around to wait for him by the garage. “And they were stuck in a mud puddle, not a speech trophy. But I washed them clean in the ocean, and then they got even softer fur and it turned all different colors in the light, so people stopped using them for cargo and started treating them as equals, trading water and gardening and carpentry and gold in exchange for fur cuttings…”
The buzz had continued well into the evening. As the seasons swooped and plummetted, went to ground and ripened, fortunate conversations would spill from this unexpected adoption of pollinators: juicy, authentic connection points for the potentially-strained parent-adolescent dynamic. But that day, in that season-opener, the thing was just happening.
Happening. Dennis considered these regular magical interactions with Glory to be good examples of things happening. That’s what it was like when things were happening.
As he blinked into the flickering dashboard display of his erratically-purring mule, he took a big sigh and regained the ability to move forward with his mandatory adulting. He turned off the car, zipped up his coat, and stepped out into the frigid night. Time to make sure nothing happened.
As he walked toward the white light of 24-hour dining, he cast his ice-tearing eyes skyward for just a moment. There, encircling the perimeter round the fake adobe castle, was a huge halo of purple cloud.
Dennis raised a poofy glove and rubbed the frost from his eyes. Nope, nothing the defrost would change. Surely enough, this midnight hour was blessed by the presence of some angel’s headwear. The underside of the lavender ring echoed neon orange from the colored lights of the only businesses open in Everett, the only dining options offered to the poor local meth-makers.[4]
The cloud seemed to swell in his regard. Something was happening.
Time stood still. What angel overlooked his work? What divine being sanctified his choice to sacrifice sleep and bodily well-being in an attempt to provide for his unique and gifted little lamb? What strange weather-mage curled its embrace around that exact spot at that exact moment?
Dennis continued to stare at the halo as he walked slowly, waiting for motion to prove it holographic. He ran into a bush, allowing it to steer him back on course, but not allowing it to remove his eyes from the ethereal ring. Was it moving now, or was it just him? Were the stars and indigo nighttime inside the circle now moving farther away? Or was it just his breath adding to the pulsing frozen vapor?
A horn blared and a car screeched its tires within inches of his toes.
“Get the fuck outta the way!”
“This is the drive thru, old man. Not the goddamn observatory!”
Hilarity ensued inside the low-slung 80’s Cadillac as it jerked forward to exchange bills for warm steaming bags of, well, mostly flour, hydrogenated oil, and filler. Muffled yelling. Menacing laughter. A pair of eyes and forehead pressed against the rear-view in the company of a long single finger.[5]
Dennis moved off the pavement, but kept his eyes in the sky, prioritizing his relationship with a seraphic cloud over his relationship with ill-mannered tweakers. The halo remained, darkly luminescent, seeming to breathe his breath.
It was suddenly too personal for Dennis to handle. He wondered if no one else could see it. He looked away. In front of his face, he saw the reflection of his own face in the window glass of the Taco Shack; stunned, tired, old. These are the words that came, as he noticed through the glass three of his employees taking turns staring at him and laughing. He took a deep breath, let it out in a puff, and prepared to assume responsibility for the store with the drive-thru and the mockery and the fake food and the dirty money. Opening the heavy back door of the taco joint, he glanced up one more time in a reverent pause, adding a silent prayer for his life, his Glory and his mother’s soul. The ring was beginning to disperse, blurring the lines between the eye and the air, the cloud and the sky.
As the door closed behind him, sealing him into the bright fluorescent, mono-odored box, he heard a cackling of either crow or crone; which one, he was never sure.
**
1. Notable to Glory was the fact that they had chosen this golden bowl among many golden bowls, rather than holing up for hibernation in the soccer team’s giant vaunting device or even the cheering squad’s formidable urn. The pollinators wanted to spend their winter with the joy of the speech kids’ unapologetic, nerdly awesomeness. Glory and Marma heartily approved.
2. But don’t take her word for it…
3. A good practice for any parental hopeful.
4. “Meth-maker, meth-maker, make me a batch! Fry me ‘til blind, cause me to scratch!”
5. “Meth-maker, meth-maker, sell me a batch! Suck up my mind, rip up my cash!”