The Bee

Mimi didn’t like bees. When she saw one buzz by the corner of her eye, she cried and ran and told it to go away, afraid she would get stung, afraid the bee would somehow get stuck in her ear or her mouth or between her tummy and her shirt and she would get stung at least a hundred times.

Grandpa waved the bee away and knelt in front of her. “It’s okay,” he said as she wiped her eyes and sniffed. “There’s no need to be afraid. Mrs. Bee was just saying hello.”

“I hate Mrs. Bee,” Mimi said. “I don’t want her to say hello.”

Grandpa smiled and his eyes got all wrinkly. Grandpa smiled all the time, like he was always happy. “Mimi, let me tell you a secret.” He leaned in and she leaned in too. “In your mind, there’s a hidden power.”

Her eyes went very large. “What power?”

“Do as I say, and I’ll show you.” She did as he said, putting her fingers on the sides of her head and squinting at the tree in the backyard. “Now, listen; what can you hear?”

At first, she couldn’t hear anything, but Grandpa helped her focus and she started to understand what he meant. So she listed the sounds as they came, the television gibberish coming from inside the house, Grandma bonking pots and pans in the kitchen, the cat begging Grandma for food, the bugs that do the annoying bzz-bzz sounds all day, the wind jiggling the leaves of the tree, the little river bubbling behind the fence, Grandpa’s loud breathing.

Grandpa said, “Good,” and told her to list everything she could see. “But don’t take your eyes off the tree.”

She squinted harder, trying to look both at the tree and not at the tree. Grandpa always had funny ideas. When she thought she finally got the hang of it, she said, “I see the tree, and the grass, and the bunny hole, and the rose bush, and the fence, and… and the sky, and the clouds, and…”

She was running out of things to see, but Grandpa said, “Good,” and she stopped trying. “Now, take all that you hear, all that you see, hold it in your mind–”

She squinted so hard her tongue came out. Hold it. Hold it.

“–then make it stop.”

Just like magic, the world stopped. The wind stopped blowing. The clouds stopped moving. The leaves stopped swaying. The bugs stopped buzzing.

Everything went still.

“Then bring it back.”

The world came rushing back like air from a popped balloon. Sounds exploded in her ears as everything started to move, everywhere, all over, all at once.

Her arms fell and she suddenly felt dizzy. She couldn’t explain what had happened, but she knew something had happened, and she looked at Grandpa.

Grandpa asked, “Do you still hate Mrs. Bee?”

Mimi had forgotten all about the bee, but she thought about bees now, about the way they buzz as they fly around flowers and sometimes around her hair, all fuzzy and small and fast, and she shook her head no.

“Remember Mimi,” Grandpa said, “anytime you feel scared, or angry, or alone, remember your hidden power.” And he patted her shoulder and led her back into the kitchen, where Grandma was making her favorite nut cake and the cat rubbed against her leg and Mimi forgot about the bee all over again.

But Mireille never forgot about the strange power her grandfather had gifted her that day. There was, of course, nothing supernatural about it, unlike what she would have liked to believe back then; no magic but that of a benign, incredible feat of the imagination.

As the years went by and she grew older, she often practiced her ability to transform, for a split second, any place into a frozen tableau. While her childish mind thought to merely stop time, her adult mind experimented with altering the scene, subduing moods and colors, until eventually all people, animals, insects, and plants were removed from the stage of her meditative theater. From a classroom full of students dozing in the afternoon heat, she would keep only desks, chairs, a sentence left hanging in chalk on the blackboard. From a bustling airport with winding lines of anxious travelers, she would study the high, structured ceilings, their echoes in silence. From the oppressive car traffic of rush hour highways, she would picture an empty road leading to empty rest stops, empty gas stations, empty destinations. From a night spent alone in the darkness of her room, she would remove the rumble of cars outside, the soft thump of feet upstairs, the knowledge of life below, beside, hidden behind her walls.

She became an expert in absence.

“But why?” asked her daughter one day. “The way you say it, it just sounds depressing.”

Mireille had never cared to explain before. She pondered her words in the leaves of her tea as her daughter sketched the idle hours away. “I wouldn’t say it’s depressing, it’s more... Well, it’s like seeing the world with two eyes, instead of one.”

“Except that you already have two eyes.”

“It’s a metaphor, honeybee. When people use an image to illustrate a concept–”

“I know what a metaphor is, Mom. Besides, it’s not a metaphor but a comparison because you used the word ‘like’.”

“Huh. Well, anyway.” Mireille poured herself another cup as her daughter hid a grin in her sketchbook. “Do you know what happens when you try to look at the world with only one eye?”

“Metaphorically?”

“No, literally.”

Her daughter scrunched one eye, frowning at her own hand. “Doesn’t feel much different.”

“That’s because your brain is compensating, I think. But if you went about your life with one eye closed, you’d experience depth very differently. Things would look a lot flatter, and you’d have a hard time gauging distances.”

“Like drawing from a photo instead of a model,” her daughter said. While Mireille was by no means an artist, she figured her daughter had found a satisfactory parallel in her own language. “Okay, so what does that mean for your,” she used air quotes, “creating absence thing?”

“It means that you, and I, and everyone else, by necessity, see with one eye while we go about our daily lives.” Mireille sipped at her tea, wondering what her daughter was sketching, what her half-formed thoughts would sound like to her ears. “When I create absence, when I transform the world into a strange, liminal space, it’s like I open my second eye. I see the… the background, of things, and when the world comes back to me, with all its comings and goings, for just a second, I see depth.”

Her daughter hummed, pausing her sketching. “So you’re, like, doing the equivalent of using negative space to draw what’s in front of you instead of what your mind is telling you is in front of you.”

Mireille did not dare admit that the analogy was lost on her. “Sure.”

“But I use negative space to get a better drawing,” her daughter said. “I still don’t get what you get out of it.”

The frustration in her voice brought a smile to Mireille’s lips. “Well, when I’m asked unanswerable questions by curious honeybees, I picture a world with no honeybees at all, and I get to be reminded what a miracle it is to have one right here, buzzing about in my living room.”

Her daughter stuck out her tongue and Mireille laughed.

Thank you, Grandpa.