Palimpsest

In answer to her cry, a second bee arrives, and a third, floating at her fingertips like hopeful wedding bands, golden and bright. November’s vision clears as the bee-venom forks through the meat of her tongue, and the underground recedes, claws at the periphery, rings her sight like the iris of an old movie camera. She takes in the Memorial, the blank plaque, the night sky waving with palm fronds, the streetside’s tangled red manzanita branches. The carriages are flashes of scarlet or silver, curtained, small worlds she ca

She steps off the Memorial. There are bees at her feet, now, too. The carriages part to let her by, and November feels, somewhere far off, tears on cheeks that are and are not hers.

_______

Down the mahogany alleys of Seraphim Street the bees lead her, now hundreds in number, a buzzing triumphal march at her back. Clothes shops line the spotless, polished road. In the window of one is a dress in the latest style: startlingly blue, sweeping up to the shoulders of a golden manikin. It cuts away to reveal a glittering belly; the join is fastened with a cluster of tiny cerulean eyes that blink lazily, in succession. The whites are diamonds, the pupils ebony. The skirt winds down in deep, rigid creases that tumble out of the window in a carefully arranged train, hemmed in crow feathers. The shopkeeper, Aloysius, keeps a pale green Casimira grasshopper on a beaded leash. It rubs its legs together while he works in a heap of black quills, sewing an identical trio of gowns like the one in the window for triplet girls who demanded them in violet, not blue.

At night, he ties the leash to his bedpost and the little thing lies next to his broad, lined face, clicking a binary lullaby into the old man’s beard. He dreams of endless bodies all in a row, naked, unclothed and beautiful.

_______

The bees spiral through the door of this shop, which has no bell, for this is a far place and such things are as old-fashioned as egg creams, and dive as one into the expanse of a lavender suit with a high cravat fashioned from a glossy green banana leaf and pi

“Please,” he spits, “I don’t want any of thathere. Immigrants are to keep to the secondhand stores, don’t you know!”

The bee-manikin gnashes its ersatz teeth at the wizened tailor, and he cringes. November starts to apologize, but the lavender suit clasps her up in its arms so quickly it defeats the words in her mouth. It embraces her like a brother, and she can feel countless tiny bodies wriggle against her. She leans her head on its shoulder, not a queen but a mate, a maid, a whore in the kingdom of the bees, luring the workers from that singular distended belly and all its promise of gold. The manikin swoons.

“Where am I?” she whispers: finally, that first and last and most obvious of questions. Aloysius wrinkles his red and pockmarked nose in distaste.

“I will not,” he hisses to the bees. “How unutterably boring. She’s new as a wound. I don’t have to.” He spits at her, gripping the thick upper edge of his paisley cummerbund with veiny knuckles. The saliva explodes against her in a shower of glass beads.

The bees roar, but November holds up what she hopes is an imperious hand, trusting desperately in their love, in her place within the long and splendid list of things which bees adore: the queen, roses, hyacinth, comb, air, apple trees, jelly, the color red, herself, herself, keeper and mistress and bride in virginal white.

They freeze, fall silent, stare expectantly at her through the empty, bee-swarmed gaps in the hive-head tilting atop its crisp cravat. November puts her hands on the tailor’s face, holding up his cheeks, withered as a wasp’s nest. Her gaze is solemn and wide, her hold on him tender.

“Don’t try that nonsense with me, girl. I’ve had more women than you’ve ever met.”

But she says nothing. This is just a dream, really,she thinks, and in dreams nothing is forbidden.

“Sleeves,” she sighs, and her voice is thick with poison and warmth. “Skirts, inseams, legs. Collars, cuffs, belts, bustles.” She strokes his thick white hair and presses her face to his. “These are things that have touched a thousand bodies in place of your hands, in place of your kisses and your worship. These are the things that have stroked their bellies and their throats and lay alongside them in the dark.”

The bee-golem grins blackly and gives a shuffling leap of delight. Victorious, they pull at the peacock feathers of the dress in the window. Aloysius just watches November, and she can feel his judgment: her hair is too coarse, striped dull, washed-out violet against dyed black. Her eyes don’t match the dress either, mottled gray-green. But he wants to obey, whether her or the bees she ca

November walks out onto Seraphim Street; her lavender-draped escort takes her arm. A few errant creatures buzz lazily behind her. They sing silently, a long and intricate song, simply to tell their queen, their mother, simply to tell Casimira that they are coming to her, coming, O Mother, O Mistress, and oh, what a thing they have brought!

THREE

THE THREE OF TENEMENTS

The tea at Oleg’s table was bitter and red. He could not quite remember buying it, but was sure he had, of course he had, sometime. Hibiscus something. Blood orange. He didn’t know. He emptied two pills from an equally orange bottle into his hand and washed them down with the phantom tea. It tasted like dead skins shriveled up to bright husks.

“Olezhka,” his sister said. Water spilled out of her mouth, just a trickle. When he was a boy, it had been a torrent. Now it was just a tear. “Your tea is already cold.”

He did not answer her, but shook out two more pills and rubbed a rough-stubbled cheek with one hand. He had dreamed in the night, dreamed until sweat fled from him and soaked the sheets. It had been so vivid—no, not vivid, livid,like a bruise. There had been the taste of sugarcane, and a girl with blue hair, and there had been something like a great iron bird . . .

“You smell like copper keys, brother. And perfume. I don’t wear perfume.”

“Would you rather hear that her name was Lyudmila, or that it was not?” he said softly.

The woman in the red child’s dress combed a long brown weed from her hair, embarrassed, but not for herself—she was forever without and beyond shame. Only embarrassed for him, who could still taste the blond woman’s mouth in his.

“Mila, I’m still a man, I still have blood in me.”

Her wide blue eyes regarded him, absent of guile or cruelty. She had never been cruel—she called herself his pet, his poor old cat, but she did not beg for milk or tear his curtains. She sat at his table, waited for him to come home from school, and then from work, and the years ground against each other like gears.

“I am not angry. When have I ever been angry? Drink your tea.”

He drank, and grimaced. No honey in the house—he always forgot something at the market.