Bumblebee
June was alone on the grass in the middle of her garden. One of her chubby hands was buried deep in a jar of squelchy strawberry jam that her mother had left as she ran inside. June was quite content there – testing her finger muscles as she closed and unclosed her fist, feeling the resistance in the jam, and vaguely listening to the shouts from elsewhere in the house.
A flagging bumblebee wriggled towards June through the jungle of grass, captured by the sharp, syrupy scent that also came from a smear down the child’s right cheek. The bee was slow and fuzzy and unaware of the curious and clumsy June-giant that had just clocked its presence. A door slammed inside, followed by the smashing of glass and the biggest shout so far. The bee paused on the tip of a dandelion that had sprouted amongst the clean blades. After a moment of contemplation, it elegantly and precisely wiped its antennae through the notches on its front legs.
June watched it for a while longer; its legs picked their way over and under the towering vegetation and its wings twitched and reflected like rainbow glass in the sun. To her, its little body looked soft and squeezable. She retrieved her right hand from the jam just as a car squealed outside, pulling away fast from the house. Finding that the bee was just out of her reach, June excitedly slammed her hands down on the grass, picked up her legs from underneath her and began to crawl towards it. The bee began to scurry the other way. June stretched out a sticky palm towards the fleeing insect and was just about to capture it when a pair of arms swooped down, scooping her up from the grass and into the air.
Grace was gasping. She held her daughter out in front of her; a bruise bloomed purple by her right ear and spilled onto her cheek. Grace’s eyes were wild and searching for something – some pain or fear – in that small pink face. A moment passed before she folded into the grass and set June down again at a distance from the now stationary bumblebee.
Licking her finger, Grace lightly rubbed away the drying jam on June’s face. Despite knowing that June would not understand her, Grace had many things that she wished she could tell her baby daughter. She found herself failing to find any that would make sense.
Grace spread her pale palms out for her daughter to inspect. June tapped a finger against them playfully, then looked up into her mother’s face for the next game. Her mother eclipsed the afternoon sun, her tied back hair outlined with a golden haze as though the whole light from the sky was coming out of her.
“You may not know it yet, but we have the power to do so much with these hands – we can break things and put them back together, we can show our love and we can make others feel pain, we can even end lives with them,” said Grace. She put her finger under her daughter’s chin and ducked her head so she could meet her eyes more clearly.
When June had been born, she’d been wrapped in a knitted lilac blanket big enough to go twice around her. Placed on her mother’s chest, small cheek against collarbones, Grace felt their heartbeats align in faint determination. Ever since that day, it had been just the two of them against the world. Grace often thought that she hadn’t really felt anything until her daughter came along.
Grace offered the length of her first finger to the bumblebee. After hesitating for a moment, it crawled onto her smooth skin, twitching its wings. Grace drew her hand carefully up so that the bee was at June’s eye-level.
“Whoever made people gave us the power to take others out of existence with our own two hands,” said Grace. “We’re lucky we’ve got our own heartbeats and feelings and brains.”
June stared intently at the bee but did not try to reach out and touch it. Behind the bee she could still see the silhouette of her mother’s face.
“I don’t think we should get to decide when others’ lives are over, do you?” Grace asked her daughter with a small smile. Her left earring was missing; a smear of blood had escaped from the small hole where a pearl should have been.
A small wind wound its fingers through Grace’s hair and kissed the backs of June’s knees below her dress. The bumblebee was placed on a cosmos flower at the bottom of the garden. They watched it squirm its way into the centre, before emerging again and, after a pause, taking flight into the next garden.
The jam jar was retrieved from the grass and June was carried into the house. Her mother tiptoed over the shattered glass of the living room door that had spilt into the hallway. Toast was popped up and butter was spread under a thick layer of jam. The pair sat on the kitchen table looking out into the garden, their food in front of them, June’s bite-sized squares arranged on the plate in the shape of a flower.
***
June is at her own table now. A glass of wine sits beside her; her briefcase has been thrown onto the chair at the far end of the room. The jungle of plant pots on her patio watch her in the sunlight and she sits, protected by the glass of the windows, watching them back. Then, through dazzling gold, flies a small, dark dot. It lands on the leaf of a violet, resting there for a moment in the warmth, before flying away again. June imagines its wing tracks in the air – the only trace that it leaves – and her mother running out into the street to stop a car from slipping away.
“Take me with you,” June whispers to the blue sheet of sky. She gets up and puts some bread in the toaster. The world is a little too big without her mother in it.