I Am No Beekeeper
Arya Samuelson
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2024 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Nonfiction
My housemate sleeps all day, makes art all night, and paints giant bees. "I want people to feel my paintings," she says, stroking the palm of her hand against a still dripping head-to-toe canvas.
I keep my hands in pockets. We've only been at the art residency for a week, and she has already transformed her garage studio into a whimsical world of texture and wonder and touch. My art is trapped inside me. Weighs down my womb with rocks.
"Go on, touch them."
Reluctantly, I pet a painting underlaid with stenciled honeycomb, and as I stroke their ridges, they bring a kind of soothing, like touching my skin beneath the crushed lace of my underwear.
The artist begs me to collaborate with her. "Write me something, anything, about bees," she implores. I scan my brain for memories, but the only thing I remember is being a flailing girl, bees in my mane of hair, panicking in summer idyll. I will have to research, learn things, think global. I acquiesce, hopeful that bees will distract from my own private grief—from the story I promised I would never write.
***
Red is coursing through the chlorophyll, and I am remembering the beauty of the trees last year and bracing for the betrayal that comes next. The way memory moves in all directions at once, leads us forward as often as it leads us back. The clenched muscles of winter already around my neck.
***
Each night, the four of us artists dine together. My housemate, the nocturnal bee artist, talks about the abuse of her first husband, the impotency of her second, and her passion for Cappuccino Häagen-Dazs ice cream without altering her cheerful tone. There's also a famous painter in her eighties who has traveled the world reimagining female archetypes. She's here with her daughter, also a writer, whose nest of frizzy hair and sparkling eyes make me want to climb into her lap and rest my brain.
These women are here to escape the burden of being a mother: the domestic responsibilities, the emotional labor. I am by far the youngest. At dinner I sit very straight and wipe my mouth with my napkin and try to resist pushing the last bite of crumb cake with my finger.
The two painters are discussing the recent overturn of Roe v. Wade. I grip the underbellies of my thighs. Then the older painter turns to me and asks, "What do you make of it?"
I am too stunned to lie. "Well, I had an abortion a month ago."
She laughs. "Ah, there you go," and the conversation flows onwards.
***
"The bees are vanishing" is an alarm bell I've heard ad nauseam, but I didn't honestly know what it meant. I could live without honey, I thought. It would be disappointing, but hardly a global catastrophe.
I didn't know that the bees are vanishing because their food is no longer safe for consumption—that it has been sprayed with synthetic pesticides, stripped of nutrients, drugged up with neonicotinoids—which is as poisonous as it sounds. I didn't know that honeybees pollinate more than 1/3 of the world's crops. Apples. Melons. Cranberries. Squash. Broccoli. 75% of the world's flowering plants. I didn't know that vanishing bees means that our food will vanish in turn. That our survival depends on the fertility of the bees.
Fertility. That word is everywhere, always meaning something good.
***
I take several walks a day up the swollen, dead-end hill. In the nearby orchard, I pluck apples from their stems. Feeling how readily they give, my heart breaks. With every tug, more apples tumble. The orchard asks nothing of me except to receive. I do not deserve these apples—blushing, crisp, tender. I do not deserve my own body's fruits, rotting in the soil.
***
I soon learn the other artists have all borne death: aborted embryos, fatal fetuses, ectopic pregnancies, children that died young. Between the four of us, we make sixteen pregnancies and only three living children.
The women adore their children as much as their art. Yet they lament the manifold challenges of being a mother in America. The exhaustion and isolation. The hit to their paycheck. The lack of support from their partners. The annihilation of their autonomy.
"If you want to be a serious artist, would you advise against having children?" I ask, optimistically.
"Oh, definitely have children," they chime in chorus. "Just don't get married."
***
A year earlier, I was supposed to marry an actor. He was warm and funny and brilliant and always angry. We had moved from Brooklyn to Western Massachusetts into a lopsided cottage. I loved when I would pull into the driveway and see our home illuminated through the window—the strung fairy lights, the warm glow of our living room, Bob Marley spinning on the record player. I proposed on New Year's Day over pancakes.
By Thanksgiving, the tree of our relationship was stripped bare. He wanted to move back to New York. I wanted to stay. This difference exposed the root system beneath. The rage bursting from his skin. My relentless appetite for connection. How I would bring him my grievances, like striking a match against a piece of wood, hoping we could sit together for a while and patiently warm our hearts. But he would pour lighter fluid on the whole thing, exploding into fury or shame, rendering the kindling I'd offered charred, unrecognizable. No longer mine.
Our last photos together were us apple picking in an orchard with crimson shirts that matched the trees. I don't remember what we made from all the apples we baked, only that it made the kitchen smell like home.
***
Bees have long received the prayers of women longing for marriage and childbirth. In Scandinavian tradition, the "honey moon" was the moon cycle following a couple's wedding, during which the newly-wed couple would be given enough mead (honey wine) to hopefully conceive a child. The Lithuanian goddess Austéja—a name that means "to weave," as in the weaving of honeycomb—was the mother of bees who watched over newly engaged and pregnant women.
In Ancient Greece, the bees were protectors of the greatest Gods: Zeus was hidden by his mother and tended to by the "Melissae", the Greek word for bees. Dionysus, too, was re-born and raised by nymphs who spoiled him with honey.
I imagine women drunk with the honey of marriage, their bellies bulging like a hive. Once I had wanted all of these things, or thought I might. Now at the residency, I lie in bed all afternoon, listening to the wind thrashing at the windows as the rosebud wallpaper shaves its petals. Feeling the summer slip away with each breath.
***
When my body created the cells of what might have become a baby, it was a slanted sun afternoon on a summer beach. Warm salty song on my skin. My body pretzeled with a man I'll call Dmitri, my head on his knee, his heart on my back. His strong arms carrying me into the sea. I was safe. I was ignorant. I was free.
Dmitri lived many hours from me and many worlds away, with his mother and sister and her two children that he was helping to raise. He was an immigrant and spoke four languages. He was Jewish, like me. The weekend that we spent together, he said I love you, and I wasn't going to say it back, but our last day together I did, because I've never been any good at keeping my own secrets.
We both knew it would never work between us. This allowed us to be enthralled with our foreign tongues, our corporeal troves, the illusion that we could not create new life out of each other.
***
Two months later, I was hunting between my legs for the blood that wouldn't come. I ate parsley by the fistful. Their limp chartreuse bodies littered my hotel rooms and rental cars. Bitter leaves of futility lodged between my teeth. I was traveling abroad and trying to feel free, happy, worthy of the beauty around me, so I delayed the knowing as long as I could, even though my breasts ached and my stomach groaned with foreign sensors, tiny dials twisted on and outwards.
Finally, denial was no longer tolerable. Crouching in my friend's cool tile Berlin bathroom, warm urine spilled out of me and onto the flimsy plastic pregnancy test. Through the walls, there was the German sing-song of my friend's son mashing his food, the swish and hum of the faucet, a day eager to be gotten on with. Acrid parsley at the back of my throat.
I'd always expected the choice about whether to carry a child would be the hardest part. That I would be forced to weigh the hunger that I had only occasionally felt for motherhood against the fear this might be my only chance. Who knew if I'd be pregnant again?
In reality, I scheduled the abortion without hesitation. There was no part of me that was ready to birth or raise a child on my own. But it was more than that. I felt disgusted by this new life growing inside me, violating my body, making a home in a place where I already lived, and this overwhelming repulsion—more than the decision itself—was what made me feel like a monster.
***
Watching PBS documentaries, I discover that I am still terrified of bees. There is something so monstrous about their bulging black eyes, throbbing bodies, their mechanical drive for labor. They awaken a space of nightmares inside me.
I watch the bare-handed beekeepers, the way they talk about their hives as families, the way they lovingly twist and turn their hands amidst a swarm without any fear. I understand that I am no beekeeper. I'm not made to be a keeper of anything.
***
In the days leading up to my abortion, Dmitri came to take care of me. He changed the lightbulbs in my kitchen, screwed on the doorknob of my bedroom, bathed my dog, cooked me so much food, too much food and let a lot of it go bad. He fucked me pushed up against the wall, which I hadn't known I wanted until I did.
Meanwhile I was pregnant with his baby, a baby he said he dreamt about the night we accidentally conceived, a baby he said would be a boy. All the more reason to abort, I joked. We joked a lot about these things. He came in me a thousand times. We did everything wrong, and this was the pleasure. We both knew this was an absurd, ravenous distraction. We both knew that once it was over, we would return to our separate lives.
For the bees, sex and death are intertwined. The queen bee kills the male drone in the act of copulation. The drone, who has no stinger or pollen basket to forage for food, has only one purpose: to impregnate the queen so that she can fertilize half a million eggs, the spawn of the next generation. She will mate with more than a dozen drones each time she flies through the air. She carries each carcass as a prize.
But I am not a bee, so I did not want Dmitri to serve me, but to love me beyond the mere moments we had together. Even though my heart thrummed every time I looked at him, every time he touched me, nothing about my decision was changed. Because I'm not a bee, my purpose was not to breed the next generation.
***
I carry the genes of Israelites as far back as can be traced, but where is the Jew in me now? My crooked nose. Dark tangle of curls. The creep of illness. Depression in the cavities. I'm a Hebrew school dropout.
Yet I still feel the pressure to marry a Nice Jewish Boy, carry his baby, and prolong the fate of the Jewish people for the rest of eternity. The pressure doesn't exactly come from my secular parents. It's more a sense of duty that runs through my blood, infuses the air all around me. Rocks heavy in my belly.
But what would I pass down besides an alphabet that forks my tongue, melancholy melodies, a history of longing and leaving and loss? I don't want this to be true, but I feel most connected to my ancestors in my twisted gut, the failed wings of my thyroid, the restlessness beneath my feet, as if my body will not acknowledge, will not accept, any inheritance besides sorrow.
***
My mother had two abortions. She says it was always the wrong timing. She thought she had her diaphragm in. Or was it three? She can't remember.
Privately I had always judged my mother. For her alleged absentmindedness. Her dissociative disregard for her own body. As much as I believed in every woman's right to choose, my mother's misremembering seemed almost callous, as if proving the Right-wingers right in their views on women's casual approach to life and death. As if my birth was as incidental as my death might have been.
When I called my mother from Berlin to tell her about the pregnancy, it was the middle of the night in New York, but she picked up, just as she always does. I thought she would be angry. I thought she would be disappointed.
"Oh honey," she said. Her voice like warm milk.
She arrived just after Dmitri left. She cooked chicken soup fragrant with dill just as her grandmother had taught her, and rubbed my back on a sea of towels, promising that I would get past this soon. I stiffened my back, not wanting to believe her. I wanted this death to mean something. I wanted my own life to mean even more.
***
Within minutes of dissolving the chalky pills inside my cheeks. I was sweating, vomiting, shitting, unable to breathe. The pain tore at me from inside out. The labor a fraction of a birth, yet the closest I may ever come.
Finally, the blood. Slow bloodied kisses into the hapless wings of my Maxi-pads. The agony dissolved and I climbed into the numbness.
So many of us want to forget. Why wouldn't we? There is no language for such a loss. There is no ritual that has been passed down to me. We celebrate pregnancy and venerate death, but we call abortion a medical procedure. We try to ignore the picketers proclaiming that we're murderers. We force ourselves to remember that Life is always a Choice, no matter what the newscasters say. We pacify the pain with pills. We go back to work on Monday.
I vowed to myself: I will never, ever write about this.
***
Worker bees, all of whom are female, share the labor of caring for the queen and larvae. They gather nectar, make honey, guard the hive, and groom each other. As the worker bees age, they move through many different roles, from nurse, to undertaker, to honey maker, to a forager who flies hundreds of miles per day. The queen's only job is to produce offspring and be cared for. She's no nurturer—that's what the community is for.
Hive-mind, we call those bees, operating in democracy as exquisite and structurally sound as honeycomb. Hive-womb, I wonder.
***
Before dinner with the artists, I smear on winecup lipstick in hopes of drawing life out of ceremony. The famous artist squints her eyes and scowls. "That looks dreadful, darling," she tells me. She is just trying to be motherly, but it stings. I singe the color from my lips.
Her daughter consoles me, embarrassed. We've begun to confide in each other over long walks—a ritual of connection I've come to depend on. She is newly separated from her husband and used to nurturing everyone else's needs instead of her own. In these moments together, my chest softens and expands like the magnificent carpet of leaves at the hill's apex.
She came here seeking respite, but instead she has found mold in her house. Gray-green blooms on the ceiling, in the cabinets, along the windowsills, everywhere she looks. She can't sleep, can't concentrate, can't breathe, definitely can't write. That night, as we wash our dishes, she tells me that she wants to leave the residency early. My heart retracts into a bud, the seasons moving in reverse.
Afterwards, the bee painter clings tightly to my arm as we hobble micro-steps back towards our house. She has had multiple brain tumors, the most recent of which has paralyzed her right leg, which drags deadened along the cement. Normally for me, this would be a one-minute walk, but together, it takes ten minutes to navigate these subtle topographies of road, and though I proclaim patience, I am burning inside. I want to run back home, hide in my room. I don't want to be anyone's caretaker. I only want to be cared for, or else I want to crash.
***
The bees have always been associated with death. Celts believed that bees were divine conduits, carrying messages in the same places they carried pollen, itching to be released. Bees whispered to the gods just as they whispered to the dead. In the Celtic Underworld, rivers flowed with mead.
The bee is the embodiment of paradoxes, opposites that fascinate. The light and dark emblazoned on their striped uniforms: the sun of the fields and the deep mystery of the hive. The honey and the venom. The bridges they fly between Heaven and Hell.
At night I swerve on dark country roads. I am wild with grief, but it's not for the child I might have had. The child is gone, and so are the others—my fiancé; Dmitri—leaving me alone in my wildness, grieving my uncertain future.
***
It's Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Dark clouds bleed through sun, taunting with rain.
I decide I've watched enough documentaries and schedule a visit to a local apiary. Perhaps the bees will frighten me less when I'm under their thrall. When my GPS indicates that I've arrived, my stomach drops. There's an enormous Trump 2024 banner flapping in the driveway. I pull in, but only so that I can take a moment to decide what to do. I keep the engine running.
But it's too late. There's a woman waving at me feverishly from the house, beckoning me to join her. I trudge towards the door and her face is wrinkled with a million smiles. "She's here!" she calls out to her husband, a Santa Claus-type figure with red suspenders. I worry that they will ask me why I'm interested in bees, or what I'm writing about, or really anything about myself, and I will instantly betray my welcome. But they only ask me where I live, and when I say Western Massachusetts, they nod with satisfaction.
Though they do not ask for my story, it is only because they have so many stories to share with me. In the quiet of their office, they draw the seasons of the bees with their hands. They let me dip my finger into the honey vat and ask if I can taste the blueberries. They outfit me in a spaceship-style suit and triple-check there are no holes in the netting.
When I allude to my "out of nowhere" curiosity about the bees, the man interrupts me: "They always come when you need them." He tells me about his history of substance use and their adult son who died. "The bees brought me back to life," he says, gesturing towards the swarms in the distance. His wife loops her arm around his and squeezes hard.
We head over to the barn, me in my suit, them in overalls and bare knuckles, lifting the lids of hives as we inspect for the dead among the living. The bees' droning omnipresent and ominous. When one lands just inches from my face, peering at me with its cold black eyes, I trip over a plank and nearly fall right on my face. But the owners don't make fun of me, a kindness that gives me courage. "They scare me, too," the woman whispers in my ear. Still, when the sky gives way to storming, I'm grateful the tour is cut short.
Before I leave, the woman pushes a giant bag into my hands. Inside are multiple jars of raw honey—amber, creamed, and chestnut—beeswax salve, a candle of a carved turkey. "Come back when you have hives of your own," they insist.
They refuse my protests. They make me promise.
***
After visiting the bees, I bleed again for the first time. Strangely enough, it's on the day of the month that I've bled for years. Even in this death, my body is returning to its old cycles. Uterus shuddering with memory.
***
Late one night, my housemate shows me her paintings, turned even more intricately layered and vibrant. There are fuchsia bees. Tangerine bees. Cerulean bees. Bees contoured onto dyed silk and peeking through cheesecloth. Most of all, I am drawn to a painting of naked winged creatures poised atop the clouds, wings blazing fire and hands spread upwards in devotion. They are ancient bee deities, those gods and goddesses that people have worshipped since our earliest origins. Praying for life. Seeking consolation in death. Reminding us that humans have always intuited what science now makes plain: our fates have always—will always—be entwined with the bees.
***
I wish the abortion was a bee sting that would never quite heal. A swollen indentation, pink and bursting, just beneath my breast, or the inner cave behind my knee. A place that others who know this kind of grief space can detect. A place I can choose to show only to those who will understand.
***
On the nights that remain, the stories of sorrow flow like wine between us women. There are so many broken things in this world. So many lost men, lost mothers, lost children, and selves that have been slivered. But we do not starve for sweetness. After each dinner we share together, we ladle honey onto our tongues, a punch of golden amnesia to the world beyond. The apples from the orchard kiss our lips. We ignore mold on the inner lids of lampshades. We hold each other's hands on the cracked sidewalk. We always leave each other with leftovers.
"I Am No Beekeeper" was originally published in New Ohio Review in 2023 and won their Nonfiction Prize.
