Half a Cup of Honey

There should’ve been two spoons in the drawer. But there was only her note, and half a cup of golden liquid that shimmered like remembered sunlight. Eat this, it said. We’ll start again.

Thom Peck stared at the handwriting. The loops on the ‘g’ were wide and erratic. Nina wrote the way she planted her garden. She ignored the lines.

He closed the drawer. Then he opened it again.

The kitchen was clean. It was too clean. For three weeks, Thom had moved through the rooms of the house with a roll of heavy-duty tape and a stack of flattened cardboard boxes. He was a man who understood the value of a ledger. Assets on one side, liabilities on the other. When a thing was finished, you closed the book.

Nina was finished.

He had packed the paintings first. They were messy things, full of violent blues and greens that refused to stay within the frame. He wrapped them in brown paper. He scrubbed the floor of her studio until the smell of turpentine and dried lavender was replaced by the smell of bleach. He took the clothes to the charity shop on 4th Street. He deleted her profile from the streaming service.

He was efficient. He was an actuary. He calculated the risk of memory and decided it was too high.

But the silence was a variable he had not accounted for. It did not stay in the corners. It filled the hallway. It sat on his chest when he tried to sleep. It was a physical weight, heavy as water.

Thom picked up the jar. The glass was cold. The substance inside was not the amber of grocery store honey. It was dark, shot through with veins of violet. It moved slowly when he tilted the glass.

He remembered the morning glories.

Two years ago, Nina had spent a summer obsessed with the vines strangling the back fence. She pulled the roots. She dried the seeds. She talked about ergine and alkaloids while he tried to read the newspaper. She said there were ways to trick the brain. She said there were compounds that could unwind the clock.

Just in case, she had said. She stirred the extract into the honey. For the bad days.

Thom had told her to throw it out. He didn’t like chemistry experiments in the kitchen. He liked tea bags and toast.

She hadn’t thrown it out. She had put it in the junk drawer, behind the batteries and the rubber bands.

Thom looked at the clock on the stove. 2:14. The silence pressed against his eardrums. If he spoke, his voice would sound rusty. He had not spoken to anyone in two days.

He rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t eaten a real meal since the funeral. He had lived on black tea and dry toast for three weeks. The kitchen floor felt unsteady under his feet. He was lightheaded from the hunger and the lack of sleep. His hands shook, not from emotion, but from the hollow ache in his stomach.

He was a rational man. He knew that honey was just sugar and plant matter. He knew that grief was a chemical reaction in the amygdala. He knew that eating this would not bring her back.

He took the spoon. The metal clinked against the rim of the jar.

He dipped the spoon into the thick, dark sludge. It smelled of wet earth covered with old flowers. It smelled like the back of her neck after she came in from the rain.

Thom hesitated. His hand shook. This was a breach of protocol. This was chaos.

He put the spoon in his mouth.

The taste was sharp. It burned the back of his throat. It tasted of deep, rich soil.

He didn’t stop with the spoon. The silence in the house roared. He tipped the jar back and let the rest of the viscous liquid slide into his mouth. He swallowed it all. A massive, defiant dose.

He set the empty jar on the counter. A drop of violet sticky fluid ran down the side.

He walked to the living room and sat in his armchair. He placed his hands on his knees. He closed his eyes. He waited for his heart to stop, or for the police to come, or for the madness to take him.

The change began in his stomach. It was not a feeling of sickness, but of motion. It felt like the drop of an elevator.

The grandfather clock in the hall ticked. Then it stopped. The pendulum held still at the top of its arc. It swung backward. The sound changed. It was not a tick, but a tock.

The light in the room shifted from the grey of afternoon to the sharp white of morning. The walls dissolved. The smell of lemon polish was replaced by the smell of antiseptic and crushed dried flowers.

Thom stood by a metal bed. The silence was gone. A machine beeped. It was a rhythmic, steady sound.

Nina lay on the bed. Her skin was the color of ash. Then, the color changed. It flushed into pink. Her chest rose. The air rushed into her lungs with a wet sound. She opened her eyes. They were not cloudy with morphine. They were brown and sharp. She looked at him. She smiled.

He reached for her hand, but the hospital room fell away.

He stood in the kitchen. The table was pine, not oak. The calendar on the wall read November 1998. He looked at his hands. The skin was tight. The age spots were gone. The ache in his knuckles had vanished.

Nina stood by the sink. She held a stack of bills. Her mouth moved. She was shouting, but the sound was pulled back into her throat. He watched the scene in reverse. He saw her face change. The red flush of anger faded. Her eyes widened. The tears ran up her cheeks and vanished into her ducts.

He stood still and watched. In the moment, twenty years ago, he had only seen the anger. He had listed the facts of their finances. He had been right.

But watching it backward, he saw the truth. Her hands shook. She was not angry. She was terrified. The ledger in his head balanced itself. It was not about the bank account. It was about safety. She needed him to tell her it would be fine. He had told her she was irrational.

He reached out to touch her shoulder, to offer the comfort he had withheld for two decades.

The scene blurred. The years moved faster.

The walls shifted. David and Michael walked backward through the door. They shrank. They became toddlers. They became infants. They disappeared. The furniture became cheap laminate. The house grew smaller. The paint peeled and then renewed itself.

Music played. A record spun on a turntable in the corner.

He was thirty. Nina was twenty-eight. She wore a yellow dress. She stepped into his arms. He felt the heat of her skin through the fabric. She was solid. She was heavy. She was entirely there. They moved in a slow circle. She laughed, a sound that started at the end and rolled back to the beginning.

He held her. He smelled the apples in her hair. He felt the strength in her back. She was not a memory. She was flesh and bone and blood.

The spinning stopped. The floor became wet pavement.

Rain fell. It drummed against the hood of a car. The air was cold and smelled of diesel exhaust and his wet clothes.

Thom stood on the corner of Fifth and Main. He looked down at his body. He wore a black coat with a missing button. His hands were smooth. The veins were hidden beneath tight, youthful skin. He touched his face. There was no stubble. He was twenty-two.

He looked across the street.

A bus idled at the curb. Black smoke pumped from the tailpipe into the cloudy afternoon.

A girl stood by the bench. She wore a man’s trench coat that swallowed her shoulders. Her hair was dark and heavy with rain. It stuck to her cheeks. There was a smudge of blue oil paint on her chin.

Nina.

This was the minute before the first word.

Thom watched his own body. He waited to see himself walk forward. He waited to see the version of himself that crossed the street and asked her about the paint. That was the story he had told at dinner parties for forty years. I saw her and I knew.

But the honey pulled him backward.

He watched himself step away from the curb. He watched his younger self look at his watch and turn his collar up against the wind. He watched his eyes scan the street and pass over her face without stopping.

He watched Nina look at him. Then she turned her head. She looked at the bus.

The connection broke.

Thom felt a hard knot form in his stomach. The distance between them was only twenty feet of asphalt. But it was absolute.

She did not know him.

She did not know she would paint the kitchen yellow in 1985. She did not know she would lose a baby in 1990. She did not know she would die in a rented hospital bed with his hand holding hers.

She was just a girl waiting for a bus. She was complete. She was a whole universe without him.

Thom stared at her. The cold rain ran down his neck. He had always believed their life was a straight line drawn by God. He thought it was inevitable. He thought they were two magnets that had to click together.

It was not true.

It was a coin toss. He could have stayed on the curb. She could have taken a taxi. The bus could have been late.

The terror of it made his knees weak. It was all chance. He didn’t own her history. He had just been the one lucky enough to stand next to her while she lived it.

He looked at her one last time. She was young and cold and alive. She shivered and pulled the coat tighter.

The light of the street began to fade. The dark edges of the vision crept in. The bus doors hissed shut.

He did not try to cross the street. He stood on the corner. The smell of diesel exhaust thinned out. The sensation of cold rain vanished from his skin.

The taste in his mouth changed. The flavor of deep earth and violet flowers disappeared. It turned heavy and flat. It became a thick, cloying sweetness that coated his tongue and stuck to his gums, tasting like old sugar.

Thom opened his eyes. Daylight filled the room, thick and colorless as fog.

He was sixty-eight. His neck was stiff. The jar sat on his lap. It was empty.

He stood up. His knees popped. The grandfather clock in the hall ticked. The pendulum swung right. Then left. Time moved forward.

Thom walked into the kitchen. The house was quiet. The silence was still there. It filled the corners and the space above the cabinets. But it did not push against his chest. It was just the absence of noise.

He looked at the junk drawer. He pushed it in with his hip. It stuck on a roll of tape. He didn’t force it. He left it open an inch.

He picked up the jar. The glass was sticky. He carried it to the sink and turned on the hot water. Steam rose from the basin. He held the jar under the stream. The water turned purple as it rinsed the residue away.

He picked up the lid. He ran his thumb over the inside.

The hot water cleared the film of sugar. There was a label pasted on the underside of the metal cap. It was small. The ink was waterproof.

Thom squinted. The handwriting was small and cramped.

It wasn’t the honey, Thom. It was just honey. I knew you’d only give yourself permission to feel if you thought it was science. Now, go plant the lavender.

Thom turned off the faucet. The pipes knocked.

He stood in the middle of the kitchen. Water dripped from the lid onto the linoleum.

There was no morning glory extract. There were no alkaloids. It was blackberry honey from the market.

She had lied to him. She knew him. She knew he was a man who needed a reason to break. She knew he would not let himself weep for forty years of life unless he thought he was poisoned. She had built a trap to force him to remember.

A sound came up his throat. It was rough. It scraped against his vocal cords. He laughed. It was a short, sharp bark.

He set the clean lid on the drying rack.

He unlocked the back door. The hinges squeaked. The air outside was cool with the scent of damp mulch.

The garden was a wreck. Weeds choked the rosemary. Thistles grew tall and spiked in the flower beds. The soil was hard and dull.

Thom walked down the steps. He did not put on his gloves. He walked to the center of the patch where the lavender bushes were brown and brittle.

He knelt in the dirt. The ground was cold against his knees. He reached out and grabbed a handful of bindweed. He pulled. The roots snapped. He threw the green tangle onto the grass.

He dug his fingers into the earth. It was packed tight. He pushed harder. The dirt broke apart under his hands. He cleared a circle. He made a space in the soil. He worked until his fingernails were black and his breath came short and steady.

He pulled the next weed. Then the next. He cleared the ground for what would grow in the spring.