The sun shines through a slatted window, bright bars betraying no outside, revealing the steam escaping from Natale’s bath. A wooden room with narrow angles, dark boards hewn and finished long ago, the rustic heat of a sauna. He rubs himself with honey and sea salt soap, suds rolling down his chest like glass marbles. The edge of the darkwood bath is lined with pastries, crumbs and cherries floating in the frothy water.

The floorboards creak as someone comes in. He looks up. Even if he weren’t reclining in the bath, he’s always looking up. His older brother is so tall and so serious, lips flat, eyes troubled. Between them, on the edge of the bath, a black rhododendron, fringed deathly purple in the light.

Tenor rests his arms against the wooden jambs framing the bath, head hanging forward, shoulders tight. “You told the servants to empty mother’s room. Her books are piled up in the garden. Explain yourself.”

“We have to burn mother’s things.” Natale’s brilliant green eyes stare from the dark, his upper half in slanted shade, the other diagonal of his chest shining in the sun, a wreath of bubbles around his waist. Tenor’s tongue is paralyzed, he knows by heart all Natale’s counters, every excuse and justification. He wants to hit him.

After enough silence, Natale gives a pitying look. “It’s the only way we’ll move on.”

“We’re not burning them.”

“Shouldn’t we?” Natale says reasonably.

And who will burn you? Mother’s madness, concentrated by your miniature form. Is it in me as well? Diluted by my height and build, a delayed poison.

By resisting you, I inoculate myself.

“I’m not burning them,” Tenor says.

Natale scrubs under his armpit with poised carelessness, the way he does everything, as if his slightest action was worthy of observation and study. “You can watch, then. And cheer me, at appropriate intervals.”

“I don’t have time. I’m visiting the Gall girl. Her family is having a calligraphy demonstration.”

“With a slut like that, you might even get lucky,” Natale says loftily. Everything he says sounds lofty, despite his stature. The incredible confidence of an insect that whines around you until it is swatted down.

Tenor is speechless. His brother still thinks everything grows until it is complete. He’ll grow taller. And I’ll grow a penis.

No. He thinks I already have one. We’ve stopped bathing together, after all.

Tenor says, “You forget I’m your older brother.”

“How could I forget?”

“I can think of a few cruel things you might mean by that. You’ll have to be specific.”

Why not all of them? “You act very important and put on airs. And are deliberately tall and full of postures. And I have to ask you for money.”

“I never asked for this responsibility.”

“Responsibility? You spend all your time visiting girls. Whorish behavior.”

“Our family tree is withering. I need to affirm our alliances and seek a marriage candidate.” His words seem to evaporate outside the warm confines of his head. He’d clung to the idea he could make it work somehow; find a girl who would keep his secret, then adopt. But they were all raised to expect an image without cracks. And if the world found out, everyone would see him as just another vessel like mother.

Natale pours a basin of water over his head and it plasters his blond hair to his skull, making him appear even smaller, a sopping runt, hapless as an axolotl. “Maybe I should be visiting girls. You’re probably terrible at it.”

“At what?”

“The act of pleasure.”

“Do you even know what intercourse consists of?”

Natale blinks water from his eyes. “Of course I do.”

“Then what is it?”

Natale holds the soap in the palm of his hand as if weighing it, biting his lip in thought. “There’s a hole, of course. For entry.”

Tenor always forgets Natale can make him smile, until his serious mood cracks from seeing how stupid his brother is. “Of course.”

“Then you push…and it gets dirty, and it makes her feel sick…but she bears it for the sake of love…”

“What exactly are we talking about?”

Natale looks up, pained. “The vagina.”

“Oh, yes. Tell me about that.”

“It is sealed, and must be broken open, but when inside there is the most wonderful feeling, for the male, very sweet, yielding with each touch, sticky and crumbling—”

“Are you impregnating a pastry?”

Natale flings the soap at his brother, it bounces off and lands on the floor.

“Give it back.”

Tenor can’t stop thinking about the ridiculous conversation. You have the cock, on a body no one will ever take seriously. I am tall and strong but castrated.

He kicks the wet bar with his boot and it shoots to the back of the chamber, catching in a nest of cobwebs. He feels a single second of relief, then leaves.

*

Evening dinner. At the center of the table, beeswax candles surrounded by white baby’s breath flowers, with plates of roasted rhubarb drizzled in sweet dark syrup of grape must vinegar, and smaller plates with steaming buns on them.

Natale takes a seat, hands white with flour.

Grandmother says, “Finally putting your mind to something?”

“I baked these as a peace offering.” Natale slides a bulging cream bun in front of his brother.

Tenor stares stiffly, still sore from earlier. “Sweet things generally don’t agree with me.”

Natale pushes the plate an inch closer, a conciliatory look on his face. “Tonight they’ll make an exception.”

Tenor takes a bite and cream squirts across his lips. He rubs his mouth, powdering the back of his sleeve. It tastes of strong licorice, salis armoniaci, mined from the solfatara, the volcanic holes of the southern penalty, a pleasant saltiness against the sweet. He has to admit, it was thoughtful of his brother to find a less cloying dessert.

Natale smiles, sweetness and relief arranged under the curtain of his honey-blond hair. Grandmother sips her rhubarb and fenugreek soup with a rhythmic thirst, as if drinking in her sleep.

Cautiously, Tenor says, “You know I’m still going to the Silk festival. I made a promise.”

Natale is silent for about ten minutes. Then he says, “Your hair is completely wrong for that kind of thing.”

“Wrong?”

“It seems self-obvious.” Natale pulls on Tenor’s lemony hair as if making a joke, except it hurts.

Tenor tries to ignore it, because the sounds his throat wants to make are too undignified. But his rhubarb knife keeps slipping, and he hasn’t had a bite of real food.

“You’re being boring,” Natale says, as if pronouncing a death sentence.

“I’m not a puppet,” Tenor replies, still failing to cut his rhubarb.

“A marionette is the one you yank on. Like this.”

“I said stop.” Tenor feels ridiculous at how upset he’s getting, at someone smaller than him, at these childish games, past his defenses like a fly buzzing inside armor.

Natale pulls again, a little harder.

Tenor rips the knife from his rhubarb, dripping with pink juice. Natale stares at it, still holding his brother’s hair. Tenor saws at the trapped strand until the knife snaps through, leaving Natale with a tuft gripped in his fist, eyes narrowed, like a toy taken from a cat.

*

A beeswax match, cupped against the wind. I watch the glow of it roam his hand like a lighthouse in a snow globe. He stands before the books in the garden.

Something twinges in my chest. I should stop him. How sad to tell him to stop. How sad to watch him burn the traces of mother forever. His logic grinds perfectly against mine, as if every other second, I shared his mentality, then reverted to mine.

The mist makes the garden a wilderness, the books a pile of rocks. He wears cream shorts from younger years, too small for this weather, and dark stockings, with a rose pink jacket picked seemingly at random, too large for him, falling like a dress, flapping as he moves. He kicks at the pile, trying to make a coherent heap of things to burn. Mother’s jewelry, stuffed animals, a baby bottle, some of this won’t even burn, just become dark and ugly.

He doesn’t look back. “Here to stop me?”

I don’t respond, just breathe in the silence, incapable of anything. His clenched shoulder blades relax and he turns to me, head over his shoulder, one leg crossing the other, a stricken look on his face. “Brother?”

I try to speak, but my lip warps instead, brow aching with pressure.

He says, “I wish we could play in the garden always, as we once did. And we never had to leave.”

I come to his side, hating how cold he must be, with the wind throwing his jacket back like that. I pull it tight. The match trembles in his fingers. He says, “I made you smile the other day.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I shrug.

“Because I said something stupid?”

He sees the cut of his intuition. It excites him. “I am so stupid, brother. I am incredibly stupid. Don’t you think?” He wobbles as if mere bipedalism was too much for him. “Not only are you stronger and faster than me, but you are so much smarter.”
He grabs my hand, eyes wide. “I will fall. Do you see? I am going to fall because I am so unbelievably, idiotic.” His eyes roll and his tongue hangs out as he holds a book up. “What does it say? I can’t read it. Because I’m stupid.” He lands on his knees in the mud, then looks up, eyes glazed. “Help. Am. Stupid. So stupid…so stupid…st…uuh…pid. Shhhhhhtooopid.”

“You aren’t stupid. I don’t know why I smiled. I don’t even remember what we were talking about.”

“Me neither, Ten. Tenor. I’m too stupid to remember.” He stands up, then flaps his arms, falling backwards toward a decorative rock. I catch him by the jacket, pulling him upright. He stands soberly, then falls as soon as I release him, I barely manage to grab his shoulders.

“If you do that again, I won’t catch you.”

He stands still again. He blinks. I blink. He slowly falls back, looking to see if I will reach for him. His heels sink into the freshly churned earth and his arms fly up and he hits the ground, his hand striking a stone. He lays on his back, a drop of blood seeping from the bruised skin.

I extend my hand, embarrassed that a servant might see this ridiculous behavior. He ignores it, staring at the ceiling of mist above us. “I remember when you got so much stronger than me. You started growing hair and the bed weighed heavier and you were so, so much taller. You would push me over to test your new strength. And I would fall, just like this. But now you want to catch me?”

“I don’t even remember that.”

“No one ever remembers.”

“Then I am sorry.”

“How magnanimous you are.”

“You’re really still angry about that?”

His face heats, then hardens. “I’m not angry. I was making a little joke.”

“I see.”

“Don’t you remember mother’s little jokes? The things she would hide? The secrets she would tell us? But the greatest little joke she ever made was me.”

Her dress flows past my cheek and time beats me like a wave and drags me to a sea of flowers. The sun, the match. The son, the kindling.

Natale’s voice brings me back, serious. “What is it, Ten? You might as well tell me. You know I already know.”

“I worry about going insane. I worry that no awareness on my part will be able to stop it.”

“Then won’t it feel good to burn these memories?” Natale produces another match and strikes it and from his hand comes the faintest trace of hot honey. But he does not drop it. He waits.

I tell him it’s a waste of good books.

The match flickers against the wind. “You haven’t read all of them. There might be some really bad ones.”

“We should give them to the church. There is a library where people can read.”

We go the stable where the horselikes are fueling on sugar ferment. Natale straddles the leather saddle of the horselike, which is too big for him. With his legs forced apart like this, the flesh between his stockings and shorts is bunched up. I see goosebumps on his skin.

“You’ll be cold,” I tell him.

“The seat will warm me,” he says, looking drunk from the ethanol fumes.

We ride into town, road carving through the mist, trench-walls rising above us. We pass slender stakes with bells on the tips, to detect vibration in the earth. The old glass dome is shattered and trees grow up through it, leaves striated with purple blight. There were executions recently, displayed in front of the dome, for a reason I forget. At some point, dogs were crucified instead of people, as a sign of the queen’s mercy. And in these civilized times, merely the tails of dogs are cut off and pinned to posts, which saves a great deal on wood and manpower.

I see the bellspire of the church and turn that way, Natale awkwardly following, inexperienced at riding, the long metal legs teetering on the unpaved road.

The way is clogged with wagons, refugees from a town which now exists solely in their memory. They stare at us. Leg black and withered, mortified from a sting. Acid burn. Bite mark. Sleeping sickness from a bite.

And my brother, making faces.

I pull next to him. “Stop it.”

Natale screws his face up even more, one eye big, the other small. “I’m just trying to fit in.”

I slap him and he gasps.

“I’m sorry,” he says tearfully.

“Do you know why you’re sorry?”

He sniffs. “I was being cruel.”

“Yes,” I whisper, riding blindly, ashamed of this discipline. Like trying to scrub dirt with more dirt.

I open my eyes and the shame only stings harder, a wound exposed to contaminants. I know this sensation to be the world, which the skin has adapted to exclude. All of me is exclusion. My mind is attracted to thoughts of my own glory, and ignores evidence to the contrary. My eyes are blinders which keep out forbidden colors, the bee’s purple. Every hole in my face must seal if I keep on like this.

So I let the world hit me like I hit Natale. My expensive clothes flaunted while these people wear rags. The jar of honey Natale snacks on, an infantile syrup paraded past people who need real food.

We come to the church. A sanctuary stone was here but it has been shattered, surrounded by pieces of red rock. A vagrant picks one up and walks quickly away, a sliver of sanctuary, a fragment of fortune. Better than none.

The library is empty, shelves stripped. I look around but there is no one to ask.

We ride away, this time through the overgrown graveyard. I don’t realize at first, the subconscious decision to avoid the disfigured behind us.

“These are boring books anyways,” Natale says. “No stabbings or recipes.”

“They contain knowledge of medicine, darkhistory, anatomy…”

“They make you sad.” Natale pulls on the rucksack and the books fall to the ground. He tries to dismount and hangs from the side of the horselike, looking so afraid of the fall that I grab him without thinking. What flashed through his face? As if the sun struck it at the same time as the moon.

“I don’t need your help,” he says, struggling from my grip and landing hard on the ground. He gets up, swatting the dirt from the seat of his shorts, pulling a match from the back pocket. And then a book is on fire.

The first loss I feel is, not knowing which book it was. I think if I only knew, it would be alright. Just to know what had been taken from me.

I wish he’d given me the choice. The chance to hold the match, or crush it in my hand. You never see him coming. My little brother. That is the unsettling thing about insects. They are very still, until they aren’t. He stings like the tiny head of that match, and soon everything is burning.

I stamp the fire out and the force of my boot surprises me, tearing the jacket from the spine, ash bursting from charred pages, flying in my face, and then Natale is on the ground under me and I slap him until he can’t breathe.

“You can’t hide behind mother anymore. Are you so stupid you keep pushing me even though I’m stronger than you?”

He hiccups, the spasm finally forcing him to shut up. My guts curdle with power. I feel every sting he’s given me concentrated under my tongue, milked like a snake. “You weren’t born. You’re leftovers. You’re the rest of me that slid out years later. You’re my afterbirth.” The stolen part of me, grotesquely pinned to your stupid little body.

He snivels something.

“What?”

“I’m the cake.” A crumbling, burnt voice grits out of him, trying to hold back tears. I come back to myself and stare down in horror. Suddenly his face is calm and emotionless, as if we had switched masks. Placidly he says, “Do you think God loves it when you beat your little brother?”

The girls say my hands are almost as delicate as theirs, so close to finding my secret. But around his tiny frame, I feel like a man. And then I feel like a monster.

“I’m sorry,” I say, so sorry I can barely speak.

His face grows even more expressionless. I help him up and swat the mud from the seat of his shorts like grandmother does, before I remember he’s not that much younger than me. What kind of deforming effect must it have on him to be treated this way, punished and pitied like a child? I recoil, sick with the thought that I’ve been stunting him with my carelessness, sick at seeing the hope return to his face.

It would have been better to hit him and walk away, not mix sweetness with pain. Because even as I apologize and comfort him, I know I will hit him again. This isn’t a misunderstanding. I have an allergy to my brother, a physical burning irritation.

“It’s okay, Tenor. I won’t burn them.” He fans the books out on an alabaster ledger-stone, taking great care with their presentation. Gentle smile, cheeks red. From the cold or my slap? “How noble you are, brother. To bring enlightenment to the masses.”

Who says such things? This unnatural sweetness, thick as poison, warm as the burning book. Smoke wafts from my heel. I crush what crawls from me. If I started burning things with Natale, I don’t think it would stop with a few books.

As I mount my horselike, I catch him in the corner of my eye, tucking one of the books into his jacket, the smallest one, bound tight with a white ribbon. Mother’s diary, her erratic ink, a black swamp I briefly searched for some sign of myself, a final judgment of what I was to her.

I want so badly to be good. But no one is around to call me that anymore. It was so simple with her. Sometimes I was Tenor, and she was strange toward me. And sometimes I was a good boy, and in saying it she made it so.

But now I am in full, horrifying possession of my own soul.

*

Natale keeps staring at me. He thinks he can read my thoughts. Or do I think he can read my thoughts?

I squeeze the copper cruce, my grip green with oxidization. A common fixture of most rooms, forgettable as the head of a nail in a wall. But lately the icons have come alive. And sleep, formerly a black-gray bar inserted sturdily between sunlight, now has such whorls and permutations. I do not remember these visions, except when I do, and then I wish to forget. Did mother have such dreams? Some people gather the madness of a place into them like dust. And now she is gone. Is this what mother felt? To be the tallest flower in the garden of God, sheltering us from the sun?

Last night, something spoke to me. It rested heavy on my chest, although it seemed bony and insubstantial—as if its feet were compressed anvils.

The taste of your own blood

It said it once, but I continued to hear it, like a stain that wouldn’t wash clean. The presence poured over me, heavy as wax. The music had been playing for some time.

Trapped in the blankets, I woke, and instantly became rational, and then forgot, until now. Because I am watching the workers load beeswax candles into boxes, yellow cylinders packed tight, wrapped in the seal of our charter, our family name wrapped in the queen’s authority, the right to sell honey. Stigmadonna. This name to be upheld, so heavy with so few of us.

I stifle a sob, hoping he cannot hear me, knowing how high my voice gets when I’m crying. This name died between my legs. Our family is like flowers wilting in a pretty vase. I am a boy as long as I stand very still. A hollow heir.

I am paralyzed by my inability to create a future. I only feel the bodies in honey below us, sinking by centuries. When mother’s hands touch the bottom of her glass tomb, my failure will have long ruined us.

Natale says, “What is it, brother?”

“I can’t do this.”

“Do what?”

“This.” I drop to the floor, digging my fingers into the boards under our feet. “This. This. This!”

“But you’re the head of the family. You can figure it out, you’re strong and smart—”

Clarity splashes my face like cold water. “God castrated me so I wouldn’t spread our family’s insane seed.”

“What do you mean. Castrated?”

“God made sure neither of us would procreate, and did it without repeating himself.”

“I don’t think I like that.”

“Do you really want to see what would happen if one of us had a child?”

“I—”

I stand up, gripping the cruce, chain tangled around my fingers. “This isn’t a world for children, anyways.”

“What do you mean?”

“Those refugees. You remember what they looked like, right?”

“It was disgusting.”

“That’s what the world is like. And we’re hiding in our mansion, waiting for it to come to us.”

“What else is there?”

“There are places where. My deficiency doesn’t matter.”

Natale places chocolate coins on top of each other, making a precarious tower. “So you’ll hide in a church instead? Praying for the rest of your life?”

“INNOCENT doesn’t hide. They put on the face of God and wear the hands of God. In the act of removing vermin from this story.”

“If the xrafstar could be eliminated, wouldn’t it have happened by now? You might as well try catching all the flies in the air.”

I knock over the tower of chocolate coins and grab one before it rolls off the table. The gold foil gleams. “These crass materials get in your eye. There is no singular engagement, no crucial massacre. We fight for our soul. Every day.” I catch my breath. “Have you ever felt such a thing? Don’t you ever get scared?”

Natale is silent. Then, in ordinary tones: “What would happen if you joined INNOCENT, and they saw how afraid you were?”

The chocolate coin melts through the foil, sticking to my palm. I shake it and the coin flips through the window, alms for the air.

Natale begins piling the coins up again. “It must be very terrible, what happens out there. I’m sure you will be very brave when you face it, when they are all watching you. After such a big gesture as abandoning your inheritance, and your family. It is brave of you to go without these protections, to this place where you will have to prove yourself over and over.” Bright smile, angled toward the sun. “I look forward to them witnessing your bravery, brother. Seeing how you excel at not running from frightening situations. Seeing how calm and undisturbed your sleep is. How masterfully you take responsibility in the face of death. How you exemplify manhood in every way—”

I almost throw him into the wall. But my restraint is not rewarded, because Natale noticed the tension in my fingers, barely a half-second twitch. That insufferable memorization of my body, the kind you get growing up together, sleeping in the same bed, this other person who will always hold you to an outdated image.

That slight smile. This is victory to him. You can’t beat him with your fists.

I squeeze my cruce instead of his throat, grateful for the clarifying pain of its spikes. There is only one answer that cuts through the fear and confusion.

God.

*

Ants swarm to the melted chocolate below the window, blackening the gold foil. Natale watches his brother ride away, surrounded by dark uniforms, darehanders from INNOCENT. He turns the hexagonal ring on his finger, the mark of the household head. His brother’s goodbye. Even on his biggest finger it sinks down, he is always tightening it so it won’t bang onto the floor.

His brother looks like an adult from here. A real fucking person. The slender build of the family, reinforced by athleticism. At ball games, Natale would bump into his brother like the other boys, but something was wrong. No expected laughter, no spark of masculine comradery, just a clinging nuisance, his brother growing like a tree away from him, into a different species, every inch an insurmountable chasm between them. How could a small boy distinguish himself in that environment? The very best blood of this family went into Tenor, and the worst, left behind. That’s what he said, isn’t it? A black slime of afterbirth, crowned with a ring, held together by the viscosity of honey.

Good riddance. Congratulations on surviving mother’s toxic piss womb.

The ring twists and twists. You want religion? This is our schism.

Natale lights the beeswax candle and a burning reflection dances across the glass hexagon. The size of the hexagon is such that if it fell from the wall, it would crush Natale like the bottom of a glass cup slammed onto an insect. It plugs up the end of the tunnel, above shallow stone steps. Every flower in the land spills down the steps, every garden and wilderness cascading past his feet. A traditional offering, brought by allies and extended family. But now the tightly bound bouquets are dead, petals withered, stalks rotting. He stands amid the death in an outfit he bought himself. A modified girl’s coat, for the cold of the tunnel. Shirt lined with lacebark. Riding trousers stuffed into boots. All white. Another tradition, tailored for his small bones.

The candle suffuses the glass hexagon, making the contents glow amber, showing him the body entombed in honey. His mellified mother, the great keeper of bees, perfector of methods, silencing all skep-tics, those who kill the entire hive for honey. Mapper of bee space, 1/4-3/8 inches, the rift that bees will not block with propolis or wax.

Natale thinks of his brother’s religious studies, the odd connections Tenor makes between the dusty books and their immediate surroundings.

God had to withdraw his blinding light from the universe to allow anything to exist. The darkness is the space where we move freely. The darkness is where we reveal ourselves to God.

Bee space. Human space. Brother space. Knee prints worn into the dust, the posture of prayer. Stupid brother. You can’t bring her back.

Natale has the hypervigilant sensitivity toward naiveté of his age, judgments that delineate his own maturity. Yet he feels keenly how little difference it makes. How enraging, these slight bones, the cause of much slight, dismissed and spoken over.

He stares at the outline of his mother’s body, caressed by honey. Nothing sweet about it. The only taste in his mouth is the tang of royal jelly, the pale yellow mucus his mother would feed him as she taught him of the hives.

*

Mother lifts the lid from the hive, exposing the writhing maze within. All bees enjoy the jelly for a few days into their existence. But only the queen eats it forever. She must eat so much. And never complain.

I wish I was a queen.

Mother put a finger over her lips. Don’t let them hear you.

I want to eat and eat and eat…

A queen is a fine word like a jewel, isn’t it? Five glistening letters…but listen. Will you listen?

Very well.

A hive must have a queen. This is called queenright.

Mother leaned over, bathing the combs in her shadow.

But it must be the right queen. When I place a queen into the hive, they touch her all over and disperse their perfume with their wings. They threaten her. Bite her all over. Hold her tight. To understand if she is worthy.

She stared into the crawling innards of the hive. Mother is threatened in this same way. Grasped, here, and here. With great force. Bitten down on. Inspected. In sleep and in waking. Do you see the marks on me?

I don’t see anything.

She smiled weakly, with gladness. Good.

What if you put two queens in? Would they make twice as much honey?

Darling. They would kill her.

Kill?

They vibrate very, very fast. With their wings. Until the heat burns her to death.

Oh.

But even one queen is in peril of this judgment. They know. By smelling her. If she is weak. Or dying. Or broken. And they will burn her.

She picked up the queen by its nape, and he watched it wriggle between her fingers.

The queen is really their slave. She exists to give birth. Mother’s fingers began to twist. Don’t you think it would be kinder to just. End it all?

The wings beat against her lavender nails, and then her fingers relaxed. But they would just make a new one.

After some time, he said, what will you do with her?

Mother looked back at the queen. Oh yes.

She took out a small pair of scissors, and Natale stepped back.

See how I hold it?

Yes.

Remember this.

She held the scissors to the bee, big enough to snap it in half. Then she snipped. A wing flew toward Natale, catching in his hair, huge and translucent and veined in front of his eye, then gone, eaten by the wind.

Now if the bees leave, and try to start a new life. They will come back to her. Because she can’t join them.

*

The day of the funeral, grandmother’s tears shone behind her black beekeeper’s veil, but her face was stiff as a statue. She left early, which made people whisper. But Natale knew she left to tell the bees of their keeper’s passing. She always tells the bees if someone dies, or is born, or anything important at all. If she dies, no one will talk to the bees anymore.

Other traditions died that way. His ancestors once ate the candied body of the deceased to pass on wisdom and virility and power. He stares at his mother’s corpse, fascinated. The folds and creases of age and gravity smoothed out by honey, hair bound close to her head by viscosity, eyes shut. For a dreadful second he imagines them opening. But even if she were alive, they would not have the force to open.

She died in the flower of her youth.

Now that he is a little older, he understands she was young, by some metric yet unclear to him. So many of the visitors repeated some variation on the sentiment. So early in her fourth decade. So much promise.

When someone dies, they become bigger and flatter than they were, pinned to a wall or drying on a page. She was a dream, unable to be pinned down, a logic that overrode his, a perpetual event.

The dream is over.

Every courtesy and condolence steals a piece of his mother from him. He used to have an ordinary fear of death, but now it mainly seems humiliating. To bend so readily into the shapes people need of you, when you can do nothing about it. He resolves not to die, as a point of pride. With that out of the way, he punches the glass. The pain travels up his arm, reminding him how tight his skin is, how minute his bones are.

Why did you have to die, leaving me with this stunted body? We are both stunted now. Neither will ever grow again. This sadness can never change. I can never talk to you. And this spite will never dull.

It took some time to realize what she’d done to him. Reading an old Zand book on gynecology, he assembled the truth no one would tell him, that had died with the family doctor. Her blood sugar had trickled inside him. He had fed on this poison, blind and unaware, until his urine was full of sugar, sucking up moisture on the way out. And so he began to drown in his own piss.

There was a needle at some point. At that stage of pregnancy, most of her amniotic fluid was already composed of his excretion, so she began swelling even more. He can’t imagine mother’s skinny body like that, it seems grotesque. Someone noticed, and lanced his dying piss from her belly.

Rage fills him. Unable to protect myself. Shackled to your placenta. The ancient word for flat cake.

My very first taste of cake.

But not the last.

He wipes dried frosting from his lips, then climbs up, slipping through a slit in the wall, into the dark behind her tomb. No one intended for the decorative stonework to be used like that, it was merely to create a sense of depth in the narrow tunnel, and perhaps evoke something of death and eternity. But he is just small enough to fit, and squeeze around behind the hexagon, where a glass panel is visible. Even if no one eats the mellified corpses anymore, the construction remains the same. He pulls the panel open and stares at a pristine rectangle of honey.

I hate you, he whispers into the sweetness.

Pain, anger, fetal blind, he can’t feel his heart. He sticks his finger in the coffin honey and sucks on it. Calm, a sticky lullaby, heart slowing, warmth. He slumps against the cold glass, hand pressed flat, stuck by honey.

Natale is under the blankets, furious in his big dark room.

It was an argument with mother, telling her to stop dressing him in those old tights which are living up to their name, stretched and restrictive, pinching the thighs, seam cutting between the legs. The white fabric is worn to translucence around the joints, displaying the pink flush of his knees.

He was so angry at her cringing defenses. The honey yield was bad this year. We should be frugal.

We’re not impoverished, mother. We can afford clothes. We can afford anything.

The house looks like this because you neglect it. Frightening the servants. Leaving out glasses of melomel so when I move through the crowded hall everything clatters…

No wonder the rest of the family doesn’t visit anymore.

The house does not reflect our station.

The ultraviolet glory of our dynasty.

Where did you hear that phrase?

You are just a child. Repeating what you hear.

No, mother.

No what?

No. No!

Our house is sad and dirty

Because you are SAD.

Because you are SO SAD.

A web sprawls in the corner above his bed, a gray mansion, a tomb without walls. He’s too short to reach it and no one cleans his room anymore, the servants afraid of the second floor. He counts the dead bees. By cold moonlight they look nothing less than common flies, stripped of their coloration, legs curled in mortal submission, black bellies exposed.

The argument breeched something in his throat, like those membranes that seal up girl’s parts. Mellifluous one his mother used to call him. But now he is the vinegar in his grandmother’s cup. It feels good to be angry, to realize she can’t stop him. He might not be much taller, but adults don’t get larger. And in fact she seems to be getting smaller. She is not eating well.

He listens. His mother has stopped crying at last. It seemed to last for hours, interrupted only by the low scratch of Grandmother’s voice.

Someone is coming. The door opens and his brother collapses into bed with his boots still on. The elderly lavender smell of unchanged sachets is overcome by a young masculine body odor, stained with broken grass. Tenor goes for long walks by himself, comes back dirty. He seems so rough these days. Is that what happens when you grow up and fill out? Will Natale be changed similarly, not by a transformation of the soul but of the muscles?

His brother doesn’t smell like a girl anymore. This stink is a threat to stillness, a hormonal contamination like the caste differentiation of bees, violations of pheromone. In his brother’s body are dangerous organs which enact lasting changes.

Natale endures the smell. He grows calm from the smell. Vinegar drains from his throat. He dreams of quivering earth, fingers clawing at the ceiling of the soil, hands spreading into wings, venation like spider webs, beating hot as the bay windows in summer, burning glass panes.

He wakes and his world is still shaking.

The bed is shaking.

His brother is shaking.

Is Tenor cold?

Natale wants to roll over and warm his brother, clinging like when they were small, but he’s still small and his brother is bigger, growing into a stranger, the weight in the bed uneven. Sleep numbs his limbs, only enough energy for the pain of thought, a draft whistling into a dark lockbox.

The room is very warm actually.

There is a wet sound, and a smell.

Is his brother sick? He feels worried, very worried and horribly vexed, anxious all over.

His brother shakes faster, then exhales as if every agony of the soul were expelled at once, immense relief like sinking into a hot tub.

Silence.

His brother’s breathing slows down, becomes heavy and unconscious. This is when Natale starts to sink like a bug in honey, the way things move in thick viscosity.

It doesn’t matter if they’re different sizes. The air is fragile and shared by their lungs. The air is colorless and passes between them.

Emptiness. Great fullness.

Emptiness.

Fullness.

In sleep he is smaller than ever, taking up no physical space, distributed like mist. Images appear like the striking of light on a patch of fog.

She would listen to him talk for hours in the flowers, the smile never leaving her face.

Yes, Natale. Yes.

Oh, my dear boy. Yes.

Does it damage the body to dispense such sweetness?

He wanders away and she watches him go, preserved like amber in the meadow, he can always return to her. He crashes into a flurry of flowers, tearing up stalks and flinging them by the fistful.

Pain! Piercing pain! Confusion!

She clutches his hand and holds a sharp metal mouth to it. Tweezers, biting the tip of the stinger, just enough of it sticking above the surface to grasp hold of.

If it was deeper, would this pain become part of him?

It stings, mother. It stings TERRIBLY.

No, sweetheart. The sting has passed. The bee is dead.

Dead?

Yes, Natale.

Did I kill it?

No, dear.

Then why did it die?

It perished because the pain it inflicted was worth its entire life.

A bitter tear escapes Natale, seeming to deflate his head and live outside of him as a wetter, warmer surrogate.

He says, that seems stupid.

Her face is strange, smile strained, punished at the corners.

I pray it remains ever thus.

Natale stomps through the pink snow, cheeks flushed to match it. His purple frock flares over his white tights, like a flipped ice cream cone leaking two rivulets of cream, the kind of thing you snap a child into, unbreeched, unlike his birth. He has a dim awareness of being a little too old for it, entering his teens, did they forget because he is small? Grandmother is so lazy, always complaining of her aches, and mother has been missing all day and father is over in the hexacatacombs.

Thinking of mother brings him back to the thought of his breech birth. Flipped and crushed, he overheard from the family doctor once. Crushed how? He feels his head under the soft blond hair. Is it the wrong shape? Is it too soft? He touches his belly. Was it the fruit inside, the organs, is this why he tapers at the waist? He just needs time to grow…

Worms writhe in the snow. Crunch crunch as his big brother Tenor runs around, exulting in the open air. Tenor is split by maturity, granted arms and a waist. Natale grows calm at the sight. He will follow his brother in form, this promised body, a deep faith. When the chrysalis breaks, what emerges does not resemble the prior state. I am wiggling, liquid, always wiggling…

Natale finds a clean patch of snow revealed by his brother’s soles. He swipes his cup through it and pours honey on top and sprinkles it with spice and licks it perpetually. It tastes a little of his brother’s boot but the honey condenses the bitterness pleasantly.

He follows his brother along the rim of the pond. The ice is red powdered with pink frost, tinted with algae like the snow.

It grows colder. Natale stamps his boots. He hates winter because it has less honey. He hears the hives humming to keep warm. He vibrates into Tenor, a collision of velvet and cashmere, rubbing his sticky mouth on his brother’s shirt until Tenor laughs from the tickling.

They return to the patio. Grandmother sits by an outdoor fire basin, covered in thick blankets, sipping a drink of galega and honey vinegar. “Bring me water,” she says, rubbing her bony legs. “And no worms in it. Boiled properly, from the kitchen.”

“Yes, grandmother,” Tenor says, pulling Natale back to the patio with him. Natale knows he might even boil it himself instead of asking a servant. So stupid and serious.

Grandmother pulls her scarf up and shuts her eyes. Natale sits by the fire. A minute later, he sees one of the scarecrows out in the snow, stripped down by weather. But it wasn’t there before. The fields are much further away.

Mother stands there, wearing her shift and nothing else, barefoot amid the worms, at the end of a red streak of algae like a wound in the landscape.

Natale tries to see her expression, a smile from the joke she’s pulling, or exhilaration from this bracing act of spontaneity, and then she will run back and put her dress on and laugh around the fire with them.

But there is no expression. Her hands cover her face.

He tears his frock off and runs through the snow to her, compelled by some mad impulse. I’m here, mother, I am the same as you, nothing is wrong—

She stares without recognition, and in this gaze he doubts his own existence, if he is her son, if he is Natale, if he has wandered into a stranger’s estate or entered from a dream or appeared on the wrong day in the wrong time, for the snow has frosted the hives and the house into misshapen effigies, the forest melted and the pond gelatinized, just as this mother is carved from the snow, a stiff statue, the pale ice of her cheeks run through with pink algae.

Then she smiles and he knows that he is Natale.

“What’s wrong, mother?”

She only smiles, sweating even though she stands barefoot in the snow.

“I will help you, mother,” he declares authoritatively.

She leans forward, looking genuinely curious. “How can you help me?”

He falters. Her face looms like the moon, descending close enough to distort into the corners of his eyes. He feels like a spilled sweet, a bit of mess being inspected.

Pain spreads across her face. “I’m hungry, Natale. I’m so very, very hungry.”

“There is food in the kitchen. I will get some for you.”

“Is it safe to eat?”

He frowns. She watches the trees and he follows her gaze, trying to see what she sees. There is only dark between the trees. The air clouds as he breathes faster. “I will grow strong and I will protect you.”

Her eyes flatten as her smile spreads, sclera stretched to white drops of milk. “Oh, darling.” She puts her arms around his frock, encircling his limbs. “You are never growing up.”

His eyes go the opposite of hers, round and wet as dollops of cream. “What do you mean?”

“Never ever ever.” Her arms tighten. “My little Natale. I’m so glad you came out small.”

She releases him, hunching over, rocking back and forth in the snow. “I had a jar of sweetness under the bed. I ate it every day when they couldn’t see me.” She clutches her stomach, fingers digging into the silk of her shift. “Eat the food on the silver tray. Eat for two when I couldn’t even eat for one. I dropped the nasty meat from the window. The ants were so grateful. They began to climb up the wall. Following my example.”

“Mother,” Natale says, snow stinging through the threads of his tights, worms curling around his toes.

“I prayed to the bees. Prayed you would be small.” She rubs her belly. “Every day. I pushed my fingers in, right here.” Her nails disappear into her belly. “I told you, I won’t let you hurt me. I will push you down.”

The air between them is a fog of steam, he is lost in it, listening to her voice. “It hurt so very much before. No one told me how terribly it would hurt. How I would never recover. They never tell their little princesses how it tears and stinks and breaks them apart.” She puts her fingers on Natale’s face. “Don’t cry, princess. They can’t put their poison in you.”

Snow covers her face like brittle fur. A worm undulates hypnotically across her forehead like a bulging vein. “My little doll. You heard my prayer. You didn’t hurt me. Not more than I could bear.”

The sound of ice crunching. She looks back at the house. “But he was too big.”

Natale’s brother grabs him, lifting his dirty stockings from the snow. Mother’s hand floats in the air where his head was, fingers curling in disbelief as if he had disappeared by magic. She looks up and her expression chills him deeper than the arctic air. From that moment, the smiles and frowns of other people seem like spots of insectile mimicry to him, crude masks above the unspeakable truth his mother showed him.

Grandmother has finally crossed the snow, scarf pulled tight, bony nose bright red. She is saying something to mother but the words don’t feel fresh, they are low and repetitive as if not expected to function as words should. Exhaustion is chewed in her mouth as she begs, extending her scarf to mother, trying to cover the freezing shoulders.

Tenor puts Natale down by the fire basin. He slumps against the stone, desperate for the fading warmth. He watches his brother run back and pull on mother. She slaps Tenor and Natale flinches as if struck by the same blow.

When the icy branches snap and rustle in the trees it sounds like insects.

Natale stares at the frozen lawn. His snow cup is spilled, honey among the worms. There is nothing except the lingering stain of sweetness on his fingers, so he puts them in his mouth, sucking until the figures on the lawn disappear.

Natale didn’t always have a brother. But one hot day in summer, mother walked across the lawn, which seemed as wide as the green surface of the ocean when you can barely get your head above it. It took a long time, so that it seemed every time he looked up, she was still walking.

*

On the other side of the lawn: Natale’s sister, surrounded by mother and grandmother with their parasols, like two clouds protecting her from the sun.

Mother says, “Do you remember that thing you pray for?”

“How do you know about that?”

“Sweetie, you say your prayers out loud.”

“I didn’t know I was being loud.”

“It hurts my ears.”

“Sorry.”

Grandmother says, “That isn’t important.”

Mother touches her ear, wiggling the lobe. “If we let you wear whatever you want, will you be good?”

A look of discomfort.

Mother says, “What’s that about?”

“I want to fit in the clothes.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t want to be like you.”

“Maybe it would be fine,” mother says in a dithering voice.

Grandmother says, “Look at her shoulders.”

“I know. I felt them coming out.”

Grandmother says, “She’ll have fat tits.”

“I don’t want that,” the thing on the grass says.

“What if they were small?”

“I don’t want that either.”

Mother holds out a vial that glows darkly amber in the sun. “If you eat this. You can be the other way. But you can never tell anyone about it.”

“Why not?”

Mother says, “Because they’ll hate you.”

“Do you hate me?”

“Haha. Not for that reason.”

Grandmother says, “She doesn’t hate you.”

“I hate,” mother says. “I only hate.”

Grandmother says, “Do you remember how annoying you became after you didn’t get what you want?”

Mother smiles, just under the rim of the parasol. Then her teeth disappear behind her lips.

Grandmother says, “Do you want it to be stuck like that?”

“I’ll drink it,” Tenor says.

Mother drops her parasol and the burning sky hits them both, painful in their green eyes, on their bare shoulders. Tenor’s hands go up to shield their eyes, and mother grabs them. “Do you know what burns us?”

“The sun.”

“That is what you are now.” Mother bends over and her hair hangs, keeping Tenor in the shade. The substance in the vial is bittersweet, and so viscous it takes a long time to finish. Mother laughs nervously, her hair trembling around him.

Queenright

the honey of fear

I desire to absolve myself of the sinful acts by confessing them. I seek forgiveness from all those living beings which I may have tortured while walking, coming and going, treading on living organism, seeds, green grass, dew drops, ant hills, moss, live water, live earth, spider web and others. I seek forgiveness from all these living beings, be they — one sensed, two sensed, three sensed, four sensed or five sensed. Which I may have kicked, covered with dust, rubbed with ground, collided with other, turned upside down, tormented, frightened, shifted from one place to another or killed and deprived them of their lives. 

— Iriyavahiyam Sutra

The first sweet Natale ever tasted was the honeycomb from his mother’s hives, the famed apiaries of his house, the most delicious honey in the world.
He didn’t stand a chance.

This was no cheap street sweet. Architecture oozed in his hand like a mansion gouged by a giant. A civilization of eusocial insects had built a city of prismatic wax hexagons for his enjoyment, organisms far more cosmic and crystalline than the crude mammals around him, the pendulous and wheezing adults. These organisms had extruded this pleasure from their very bodies and chewed it until it was perfect, from their mouth to his, he could feel their mandibles in the honey’s acidic bite, a pleasant burn spreading across his lips, coating, clinging, flowing down his throat in a soft sticky fire as he suckled the waxy geometry.

This was the melam of the book of INNOCENT, this was the sweet rain of the peacock angels, this was the speech of the paradise star, the condensate of the sun, tessellated tranquility. The vagaries of folklore and the ambiguity of myth, every inchoate evil and ineffable good was given form by this golden syrup.

But not all honey was the same. It varied from flower to flower. And if flowers were pretty, honey was beautiful, a sublimation of this charnel, bedunged earth into something better. And perhaps further transfigurations were possible of which he was not yet aware but which brightened, blindingly, the horizons of youth. He spurned the sun for honey, this licentious orb, entirely cheap and incompetently crafted. A mindless furnace, a monophonic chant.

By contrast, the honey of bees is a reflection of their surroundings, an amber mirror. This first taste was full of wild flowers, bringing him the dark meadows he was not allowed to visit. And mixed into that bite were the magenta petals that burgeoned across the estate, and these were responsible for the burning, and the bees visited the red field as well, the poppy flowers which breathed morphine into his veins, giving him a very good first impression. His grandmother watched him dance dizzily across the lawn, cackling as she ate her toast with rhododendron honey, a cliff of pink flowers swaying behind her. And his mother stood in her beekeeper’s veil, so it could not be said what she saw.

Below his feet, there were other beings which made honey, but for whom flowers were too small and humans just the right size. And just as he clutched a miniature world in his hands, so was his world grasped in their mandibles, and his blond hair did flower for them, flaring as he ran with the velocity of sugar, blossoming into a hood of bangs like the bell of a salvia. Bees are blind to red, but they adore the color of nobility. The violet beyond human sight is visible to them, purple concealed in yellow. Certain flowers have markings to guide bees to their pollen, visible on this spectrum, and some said the noble dynasties were similarly painted. Surely his skin was dappled in ultraviolet, spectral heraldry promising the finest vintage. Was this why the bees trailed him in a humming cape? Why they spun around him, searching for entry?

He had a dismissive air whenever people tried to scare him as they do with children, telling him of hot stoves and snakes and poisons and strangers and the war with the xrafstar. He knew his brother would protect him.