By Lydia Schofield

My parents have gone to Europe to play at being youthful and in love again. I’m ten years old and pretending not to miss them. My granddad is interstate, visiting cousins, so it’s just Grandma and me in the house. 

One morning, we wake to find the windows are blacked out with a throbbing throng of bees. Grandma turns her hearing aids off to shut out the buzzing. I sit up at night, listening to it. I swear they’re trying to tell us something. 

***

We eat a lot of honey. It seeps through a hole in the roof where rain comes in during winter. We put a saucepan under the hole, and I watch the thick amber liquid drip, drip, dripping down. I expect it to plink like water would, but it’s muted and thick, like how I imagine dripping blood might sound. 

***

My grandma can play Scrabble for hours. Because there is no one else in the house but me, and the door is jammed shut by the crush of bees, I have to play Scrabble for hours, too. I read a lot, but I am not good at word games. I keep making bee-themed words.  BUZZ. SWEET. STICKY. HIVE. HIVE. HIVE. STUCK.

While Grandma hums and haws over her moves, I imagine what the house must look like from the outside. I wonder if the bees have mistaken Grandma’s square weatherboard for a giant hive. I wonder if the bees think Grandma is their queen. 

***

The phone line cuts out. The TV aerial is snapped off the roof by the swarm. The outside world is static. The house felt claustrophobic before, but now I feel like we’re hiding. We can’t reach out to anyone. We can’t peer out at the world through the six o’clock news. Grandma still sits in front of the fuzzy telly at five every night and shouts her answers to a quiz show that isn’t there. 

I ask her to teach me knitting or baking or sighing with deep, sad judgement – all those skills grandmas are good at. But my grandma never learnt to teach people things. She says, ‘I’ll just show you how to cast on,’ and four hours later she’s knitted my scarf for me, while I sit on the plastic-covered couch twiddling my thumbs. 

‘Thanks, Grandma,’ I mutter, running my hand over the complicated hexagon design. 

***

There are photos of Mum and her siblings as kids all over the Hive. They hang in hallways, they’re propped up on Grandma’s bedside table. I steal one off the living room wall.

In the rumpus room, I rummage through the old dress-up box and find Mum’s confirmation dress. That night, I sneak out of Grandma’s bed – she can’t sleep on her own with Granddad away – and head to the rumpus room, stolen photograph in hand. I take the dress from the dress-up box, put it on, and approach the mirror. 

In the dim lamplight, I examine myself in the dress, and pin my hair in a clumsy imitation of Mum’s. I look eerily like her. 

I thought being her would ease the ache of missing her, but instead, a deep, buzzing fear rises inside me until it matches the timbre of the buzzing outside. I take the dress off as quickly as I can, almost ripping the zip, and hold it to my face. My tears slide off the taffeta. It doesn’t smell like Mum. 

***

One night, the buzzing reaches a furious crescendo. The bees push in on the house. The walls shake. The window frames rattle. Grandma yells at the bees to keep it down – she’s trying to watch Murder She Wrote through the static on the telly. 

I curl up in Grandma’s bed with the covers pulled tight over my head, and imagine Mum is there, stroking my hair and telling me it’ll be alright. Somehow, I fall asleep. 

***

Light streams through the window the next morning. It’s so quiet, I worry the buzzing has deafened me, so I stomp and clap and shout to check. It hasn’t.  

I turn to the window – I can see out into the backyard and across the street. The bees are gone. 

I pad through the house, calling out for Grandma. There is no reply. Her dressing gown is on the hook. Her shoes are lined up neatly in the wardrobe. The doors are all still locked from the inside. There is no sign of her anywhere. 

I shuffle to the kitchen and stare down at the saucepan we were using to collect the honey. I find a bee with small stubby wings and a long abdomen. It’s suspended in the thick, amber liquid. Stuck. Drowned. 

The queen.

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Lydia Schofield (she/they) is a writer and artist from Naarm whose work has appeared in Books+Publishing, Catalyst and WhyNot and the anthology ‘What You Become’. You can hear her pit books against each on her podcast The Shortlist. She is most easily found haunting the closest library, or online at lydiaschofield.com