The Cost of Closeness

It’s hard to tell if they’re playing tag, or thrusting nectar-drunk love at each other— mid-June attempts at getting it. Maybe they’re fighting over first flowers— legs twitching in hypoglycemic half-paralysis, like the buzz of waking mid-vacation, still dazed, muscles aching, but that stinger, coiled stiff for the week. Their terror-tails would end me, or at least suspend me, breath held between here and wherever histamine takes it. I appreciate the bees, I really do, their work, their faith in growing things. But the anaphylactic risk of their existence in relation to mine turns close proximity into a kill-or-die situation: all stabs and fury, and neither of us wanting it to end that way.