Bee

I sit in the kitchen, fan whirring on high, as night falls on the last shards of spring. The evening star, beacon and friend, descends a blink at a time down the dusty window screen. I look up from a borrowed book. The room is scented with cold tea, green with jasmine, and the few remaining licks inside a yogurt cup. I notice the jumble of mugs and flea market juice glasses waiting to be washed. I quickly gaze past them and settle my eyes on the bee.

It was on the floor, dead, by the cat food bowl earlier in the week. I remember not not wanting to throw it away, but felt too lazy, at the time, to lay it under the hostas. So instead, I placed the bee on the sill, one stiff leg pointing skyward.

It is such an impossible little creature, with cellophane wings too small, in theory, to lift its weight. Yet, those bits of cellophane carried it up to my second floor kitchen, defying science and reason. Whether it died at the paws of a cat or whether it simply expired, unaided, next to the button-shaped kibble, I cannot know.

But its messages of "things are not so impossible as they seem" and "with willingness comes lift", I can know and I do know, and in its sacrifice, at the last shards of spring, I remembered.