by Chris Carrel

I had not intended to fall in love with a bumblebee, but then who means to fall in love with anyone? It just happens, like the arrival and departure of seasons, the weather of love is shaped by greater forces than can be seen. At the time I met her, I was sitting in my backyard writing hut distracting myself from a screenplay rewrite on a reboot of a reboot. It wasn’t my first rodeo with a script written by committee, and mutated by market data and favorability algorithms, but I was beginning to hope it might be my last. I had begun to refer to myself as a script technician and at times doubted whether I qualified as a real writer anymore.

On that day, blessed diversion found me through the window. Pacific Northwest springs arrive in riotous explosions of green shades and colorful blossoms that flood your eyeballs and inebriate the spirit. It is a season prone to confabulation, declaring itself eternal, erasing all thoughts of the recent winter and foreclosing premonitions of fall returning. So bright were the yellow, red, purple and orange flowers amid the riot of green, that it was hard to believe they couldn’t live forever. Some of the flowers I saw were even dancing, bowing up and down like drunken congregants at a baptist revival, though the day was breezeless and sunny. I went outside to have a closer look and found the culprit of this mystery dance was bees. Fuzzy, black and yellow bumblebees, the kind you commonly see here during spring and summer. As a bee would land in a California poppy’s orange bowl of petals, their weight caused the tall flower to crash towards the dirt. The long spindly, green stem was just strong enough to hold bee and flower bouncing an inch or two above the surface. When the bee flew off after a few seconds of pollen gathering, the stem rebounded launching its orange flower like an amusement park ride back to its original position. The combined effect of the bumblebees coming and going among the twenty or so long-stemmed poppies was like watching piano hammers repeatedly striking the strings without sound. The motion was mesmerizing. 

As I watched the bees fly in and out of the flowers, one bumblebee, in particular, caught my eye. Though she looked the same as her sisters, with a fuzzy black body striped by three thicker yellow bands circling her backside, she flitted from flower to flower with a verve that set her apart in my view. She worked hard, as bees must, but she moved her body with the lightness and precision of a dancer and the playfulness of a new lover. She seemed to enjoy what she was doing. You might think that all bees of a species look and act alike, but I felt certain this girl was special.

This was a bee who appreciated life and the work she had to do in it. I could use some of that, is what I thought, at the time. Lately, my own work had been reduced to a paycheck. I made a good enough income that a career change seemed out of the question, but it had been a long time since I felt joy in it, or pride in the eventual movie. On the rare occasion that I saw the finished film, I often could not tell what if anything of my writing made it into the theater.

Ever since I was a young girl, I wanted to be a writer of short stories, but there’s no money in that. It’s been years since I’d even tried to write new fiction. Now, I wrote not to create something original in the world, but to do the opposite and to make my house payments in the process. If I could sit down and write without any external pressures, I could be happy, I thought. Like a bee flying between flowers, lapping up nectar from the fertile folds of brightly colored blossoms. Instead, I was a trained monkey chained to a laptop and forced to regurgitate tired, old tropes over and over again.

“I hope it’s alright if I watch you work?” I said to the little black bumble butt sticking out of the petals as the orange flower hovered off the ground. 

Pardon me? she buzzed, then grumbled in a lower register. Hang on.

Her translucent wings worked furiously to lift her fuzzy body from the flower. As the poppy rebounded she came to hover in front of my face while I repeated the question.

I’m not working, I’m living, she said in a voice like a song played by many tiny instruments. You can watch me living. It’s as free as spring pollen.

I had never before looked so closely into the face of a bumblebee. Her breath smelled sweet and floral, like a fresh bouquet. She was beautiful in her terrifying perfection, a heart-shaped face covered in yellow fuzz and capped on opposite sides with large, black teardrop eyes that were as mysterious as a deep lake. Two antennae danced expressively above her head. Coquettishly, if I wasn’t mistaken.

“If you’re sure you don’t mind,” I pressed.

Yes, Yes! She laughed. Maybe later, I’ll watch you living for a while.

She descended into the bowl of another poppy flower, which bowed and danced to her presence.

“Is that as fun as it looks?” I called as she moved to a nearby flower, but she didn’t respond. Before flying back to her home, though, she made an orbit of my head and called out, You should try it sometime, sweetie! before flashing away toward the trees at the edge of the yard. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought she had just flirted with me. 

It rained the next morning, and the bees and other flying insects stayed hidden. Apart from the spare robin or crow, falling water was the only thing that moved in the yard. The leaves of the trees and plants drooped under the weight of the rain and lent the morning a depressed and defeated feel. I shut myself inside the shed for much of the day, finding myself surprisingly productive, despite my sullen, cloud-sodded mood. 

The Sun returned late in the morning and as I walked to the house for lunch, I saw the California poppies beginning to dance anew. When I returned to the shed, I saw that my new friend was back at work, busying herself with a prodigious patch of buttercups and dandelions that dominated a corner of my shabbily maintained lawn.

“Hello, Poppy,” I called to her as I walked by, summoning the name from the flower I first saw her at. “It’s a beautiful day for flowers.” She waggled her rump in greeting as she combed busily through the anthers of a lofty dandelion. Her tiny black feet danced expertly on the thin golden petals, her wings lifting where needed. I wanted to stay and watch the grace and artistry of her efforts but I had to return to work.

Later that afternoon, a tapping on the window broke my concentration and I looked up to see Poppy wiggling her antennae at me. I opened the door to let her in and she cruised about the tiny, cramped space in a gentle arc, surveying my overloaded bookshelf, the unreliable printer and the desk covered in manila folders, notebooks and index cards. The buzzing of her wings sang around the small room as she approached me. The warm, itchy smell of pollen teased my nose.

I’m on my way home to deposit food but I wanted to remind you to smell the flowers. They’re one of the best things in life.

“I will,” I promised. “But if I get too busy in here you might have to come remind me.”

Her antennae and facial hairs shuddered slightly, an expression I would later learn to be the bumblebee equivalent of blushing.

I do get busy myself, but I like you so I will try. With that she buzzed her way out the door. 

I went directly outside and smelled buttercups, tiny tips, and Oregon sunshine, along with a pumpkin-hued poppy. As I inhaled each flower, I asked if she had been there.

Poppy and I saw each other frequently over the next several days as she flew about the garden. She often knocked at my window to tip her antennae in greeting. We exchanged small talk about the weather, the flowers that were in season, and the miscellany of our respective days. She was easy to talk to and our conversations flit brightly among topics, like a bee sampling sweet blossoms. 

Then followed a few days in which we didn’t see each other. I had a number of meetings and appointments to attend in the midst of a string of cool, wet days. I missed her company and felt irritable and incomplete. In this state, I began drafting a short story about a lonely Irish nurse in 1950s Kansas and the injured farmer she cares for in the hospital. I kept telling myself it was too sappy and the writing weak, but I kept working on it, driven by the sudden, powerful need to write something original. 

By Wednesday, I had to return to scriptwriting and did so in a miserable mood, despite the Sun’s return. The gray, cloudy weather of the past few days seemed to have taken up residence inside me. I had fallen behind on the script so I forced myself into productivity in the way that desperate writers under deadline can sometimes do, punching out tight sentences that had previously eluded me. Around three in the afternoon, I went into the house for coffee. When I returned to my chair I found a small pile of yellow pollen left on one of the note cards on my desk.

The gift was a perfect antidote to my sulk and I could have kissed her, if such a thing were possible. She remained unseen the rest of the day and I worked into the night to finish my rewrites and send them off to the script manager. Contrary to the happy reunion I imagined, Poppy came to my office the next morning in great distress. I held my hand in front of my face so that she could land in the palm. As she spoke, waves of emotion rippled through her fine hairs and delicate wings, and lightly tickled my skin beneath her feet. 

Her sisters had taken notice of our friendship. They disapproved from the start, but had let it slide until she gave me her gift of pollen. 

Giving hive resources to anyone else is a crime, she droned woefully.

“But you collected that yourself,” I objected. Perhaps, a bit too hotly, but, as a writer I felt keenly the sting of misappropriation. 

Hive law says all that comes from the hive, and all goes to the hive, so I am guilty. She lowered her head and her antennae drooped slightly. The play of light and shadows in my office highlighted the tiny, fine hexagons composing her compound eyes. There was something strangely human in such alien beauty and the realization of my feelings for her arrived in a sudden jolt of clarity. I threw all caution to the wind.

“Not everything comes from the hive, Poppy.” I touched my free hand to my heart, hoping the meaning of the gesture would come through as I confessed my love for her. 

“The hive has no claim on my feelings or the person I see who inspired those emotions. And unless I am wrong, you feel something like this as well…”

Oh, I do, Colleen! She buzzed brightly again and her antennae danced with the truth of it. You call to me like a flower.

“Well, the hive didn’t make that either,” I said as calmly as I could while my heart took flight within my chest. “We made that together.”

Things happened quickly after that. Her sisters gave her an impossible ultimatum: Choose me or the hive. They thought this would force her to abandon me but they failed to understand the nature of romantic love and perhaps, they didn’t know their sister as well as they thought. I set up a small wooden box in the house filled with dirt from the yard. Poppy spent the better part of the next three days building out her subterranean chamber, reinforcing it with wax  and making her space comfortable. I tried to focus on my work while she nested, but found it difficult. Since the divorce, I had become used to the quiet routine of living alone and now with Poppy moved in, I found myself at equal turns giddy and awkward.

All the familiar angles and spaces of my home felt new and exotic, and I moved around the place like a visitor, afraid I would do something clumsy or stupid and thoroughly discredit myself in the eyes of my darling. 

Of course, things were much stranger for Poppy. I was living in a place designed for humans and filled with furnishings and cultural references to reassure me I was nestled within a larger society. Her entire life had been lived in a crowded and tightly knit colony, working, eating and sleeping with several hundred sisters. All those sights, routines and smells of home were missing. Though we were happy to be together, she couldn’t escape the fact that for the first time in her life — and for the rest of it — she was without her family.

It helped  her to talk about her former home. Many evenings before bed she recounted stories of hive life and filled in the colorful characters of her sisters, though I confess I couldn’t keep track of them all. They say humans have the mental space to track about 150 relationships. Bees like Poppy easily exceed this. Their ability to know and remember their sisters is as remarkable as their detail for flowers.

We settled into a daily routine. While I worked in my writing shed, Poppy performed her regular floral work while becoming something of a flower tourist. Freed from the dictates of the hive she took opportunities to visit new kinds of flowers, and explored the blossoms available in neighboring yards. In the evening she would describe her adventures and tell me about the different flowers she encountered. Poppy knew the details of my yard and its creatures to an exquisite degree. I could only describe the yard’s obvious features, the house, the garden, my shed, the maple tree, and so on. Poppy cheerfully told me stories about individual plants and trees, the position of branches and leaves at various times in the spring and the tales of their growth, so far.

When I learned to read her waggle dances she described for me the dance of colors and shades of light that played through the yard and how they changed with the moods of the weather. She buzzed-sang a joyful ode to flying through the air currents that prevailed between the trees and the flower garden. showing  me that what I had previously thought of as my backyard, was an undiscovered world, built by millions of creatures I ignored, from birds and bees to worms and tiny soil creatures. While I frittered my time away on forgettable scripts for sequels and reboots, these unseen artists wove together a teeming wild ecosystem with a million intertwined story threads that composed the fabric of earthly life.

In contrast, I found the human world dull and difficult to explain to her. Our atomized lives lived in cars and buildings sounded sad and lonely to me in comparison to the bumblebees’ communal society living immersed in nature’s rhythms and dramas. Though I had always considered myself a happy person, I began to have doubts as I described the routines and practices of my own life and work. Poppy was particularly confused by the concept of jobs and she interrogated the idea repeatedly.

“Work is how you get what you need to live,” I told her as we talked at the kitchen table one afternoon. I drank a lukewarm cup of coffee while Poppy sipped nectar from a wax cup the size of a lid from a tube of lip balm. “It’s like gathering pollen but instead of making honey, we get paid money and we use that to buy our own honey.”

Money, it turned out, was difficult to explain. I had never really thought about it before and when I tried to clarify its function, I always seemed to end up saying that’s just the way it is. It was even harder to explain property ownership. Bumblebees only recognize the natural common rights of the Earth. Yet, she was an easy going girl and agreed that much of the human world was beyond her realm of understanding.

The important things are what we share between us, she decided.

When Poppy asked me to read some of my writing to her. I chose the short story I had written about the nurse and the farmer. 

She was silent for a moment after I finished. Then, her body buzzed and vibrated, as she stood on my palm. 

You made flowers with your words. Her small bee voice dripped with wonder.

When I told her that I doubted I could sell it and she would likely be the only other person who ever heard it, she simply told me, Flowers can’t be sold.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her.

The hive continued to shun Poppy and I worried how this would affect her. I had my own painful experience with estrangement. My mother refused to speak to me for several years after I came out and I still carried that bruise on my heart.

I feared it might crush her to be rejected by her mother and several hundred sisters, but it seemed to animate her, instead. She was sad sometimes but Poppy transformed those low moments through work. She spent long hours in the yard, gathering nectar, which she kept in hexagonal cups that she made from her own beeswax. She gave away the excess nectar to a hive of progressively-minded black-bottomed bumblebees in my neighbor’s yard. 

At first, I assumed that Polly’s vigorous work regimen was meant to distract from her pain. After all she didn’t need to collect as much nectar and pollen as before since the hive didn’t want her contributions. I had always been told that pollination was an accidental byproduct of bee’s pollen gathering behavior, but Poppy assured me that bees understood what they were doing. 

How could we not know?! Her voice buzzed with laughter. The flowers won’t shut up about it.

I was hatched to serve my sisters and pollinate flowers. Her voice grew serious, almost defiant. With her antennae, she gestured at the wax cups filled with sweet nectar that lined the counter and bookshelf. If my sisters won’t have me, I will pollinate as many flowers as I can while I’m here.

The differences we negotiated were more than just cultural. We lived life at different speeds. Where Poppy spent a second or two at each flower, I labored over words and often spent long periods staring at the screen or printed page as the gears of my mind slowly ground forward. I marveled at the amount of living Poppy had packed into a life that, by mid-June, I estimated had lasted maybe eight weeks. Our sense of time and history was naturally quite different, and yet we met in the middle somehow. We built for ourselves an in between place where time moved at the pace of our love. 

Our evenings were quiet, as you might expect from a diurnal pollinator and a writer. She made herself a special beeswax couch on the coffee table that she could rest on while I read to her, or we listened to music or watched TV. We whiled away many hours just talking about life.

Like any couple, we changed each other in often unseen ways. We altered our perceptions of history through the stories we told of our lives before we met, and we opened up bright new possible futures through the stories we created daily between us. Perhaps we pollinated each other, in a sense.

I know people will want to know if we enjoyed a physical love and if so, how we did it. I may be a bit old-fashioned but I don’t think it is proper to share such details as if it were common gossip. Let just keep it at this: we did love each other, thoroughly, and there are amazing, erotic things one can do with nectar and pollen and the delicate attendance of tongues.

 It wasn’t until mid-summer when I discovered my dreadful naivety. It was the sight of the California poppies dying at the end of their season that sparked a horrible epiphany. I rushed to my computer and searched for information about bumblebee lifespans. I was in tears before I’d read half a page. 

We didn’t have long. A matter of weeks, perhaps, if we were lucky. 

When I worked up the courage to broach the matter with her, Poppy was also surprised, though not in the way I’d expected.

You survive the winter?! There was awe in her voice. Only queens live through the winter.

Though I’d told her stories of my childhood I had not realized that she naturally assumed they had occurred earlier this year.

Despite the depth of her feelings for me, insects approach existential matters in a more factual and less sentimental way than humans. Their lives and deaths are held closely to the rhythms of the natural world. They just don’t spend a lot of time living in their own heads, fearing the end. When death comes, it comes, whether it’s old age or a crab spider laying in wait behind a petal. How you die is not your story and there is no untimely death, only the life you lived, the pollen you collected and the flowers you pollinated.

I was not a bumblebee, though. I was the one who would be left behind to grieve. The thought of losing her terrified me. I had become accustomed to the sound of her wings buzzing around my head, the music of her voice and the gentle caress of her feet and breath on my skin. A world without her loomed and an ache blossomed in my chest and throat when I thought of it.

But there was nothing I could do to avert what was coming. She would die and I would be alone again, and very soon. I ultimately found inspiration in Poppy’s positive transformation of her estrangement with the hive.

“Maybe this is a gift, this knowledge,” I told her one evening. “People often take each other for granted. They think their relationships will last forever. But knowing this, we can make our last days the best possible time. We can live out our last days together in the way we want to.”

I want to see the flowers, Poppy said, after a moment’s reflection. Her black eyes seemed to shine and sparkle with the idea. All of them. My entire life has been here. Just forty-nine different kinds of flower. I want to see the rest. As many as we can.

I pushed all my projects aside, claiming a death in the family. We began taking road trips to visit different parts of Washington and Oregon, to find new flowers for Poppy to see, and to touch and smell and pollinate. There were hundreds of flower species for us to chase before fall arrived. We took day trips to parks and forests nearby and longer trips to mountains, dry forests and deserts. In this time, I saw more of my own native habitat than I ever had before. While she visited her flowers, I wrote in my notebook and took small hikes.

Late at night in our hotel room, Poppy would recount each of the flowers she had visited that day, describing the distinct flavors of their sweetness, the exquisite surfaces of anther and pollen and the shimmering electric field each blossom wears like a magic cloak. The flowers came alive to me in her telling, appearing in my mind as characters in nature’s great movie. I wrote down her memories, adding my own observations, and embellishments of word and style to translate for the human audience.

We saw seventeen different kinds of buttercup, and wild roses that grew in bogs and their spiny cousins that clung tightly to rocks in mountain meadows. We saw few-seeded bittercress, hairy rockcress and field pennycress, and we saw white mountain-heather, pink mountain-heather, and yellow mountain-heather. We stopped to visit roadside flowers I spotted as I drove. We hiked mountain trails to find the last blossoms of the summer. 

Poppy pollinated bright yellow hound’s-tongue hawkweed, and the tall and spiny slender bog orchids. At the edge of a Pacific Coast salt marsh, she delved among the malodorous bouquet of the northern rice root’s black lily blossom. Alongside a quiet road in Central Washington, she rustled among a group of foothill daisies growing in a loose clump of yellow grasses. While I watched from below, she ascended a rocky cliff to greet the Sitka mistmaiden, a small plant thrust forth between two rocks, proudly proclaiming sunny-side up yellow centers inside white petals. 

Both of us were amazed and delighted by the number and variety of different flowers we discovered during our weeks on the road. I believe we were at our happiest then, even though death mercilessly stalked us.

By mid-september, Poppy began to grow weaker at an alarming pace. I woke each day worried it would be her last. 

One Tuesday morning, she asked me to take her to visit a field of flowers at a park near our home but the weather would not agree. Instead, we watched the yard from behind the windows of our cozy home.  

All my sisters are dead, or dying, like me, she said that afternoon as we watched the endless waves of drizzle descend from the drab, gray skies. Everyone I know will soon be gone. Everyone. But you.

The Sun returned the next day and brought a few more degrees of heat with it, and Poppy seem to rally remarkably. I suggested we drive over to the park where several bushes of scarlet bee balm were still in bloom.

Yes, let me see the world while I still can. Her voice sounded faded and weak.

I placed a small square of yellow fabric on top of the dashboard by the steering wheel, and gently positioned her on it so that she could watch the world going by as I drove. 

We made small talk the way old couples do. I complained about the price of gas as we passed a service station, and mumbled about how I needed to do a load of laundry when we got home. She reminisced about happier times with her sisters during the spring. Finally, we settled into what seemed like a comfortable silence.

I arrived at the park to find her gone. Her tiny body lay still and lifeless on the yellow cloth as I parked the car. I softly spoke her name several times, though I knew she was no longer with me. The interior of the car felt strange and lonely like an abandoned house and I thought I smelled dust in the air.

Sliding her delicate body from the cloth into my palm I brought her to eye level. The vibrating brightness of her had departed and left behind only a husk. The hairs on her black and yellow carapace looked stiff and plastic and her ebony eyes had gone dull. 

Though I would break down in tears later, they wouldn’t come just then. Outside, the sunlight shone warmly, burnishing the green hues of the grass and the trees beyond. Across the shallow lawn lay a small rose garden, its blooms still vibrant and catching the early light. It was a day that Poppy would have loved, the kind of day she allowed me to see anew through her eyes.

I considered her body in my hand. How light she was in death, as if the greater portion of her had already taken flight from her physical remains. Such is the miracle of life that someone so small and light could bring love to something as large and ungainly as a human being.

I walked her across the grass to the scarlet bee balm, a broad bush of green stems topped by a profusion of scarlet-red globes that looked like three-dimensional asterisks with their multiple spiky petals. I stood there for awhile with my dear Poppy, admiring the brilliance of the plant. Each flower was a cluster of deep red, two-lipped petals their long openings shaped for hummingbirds, despite the plant’s name. Even if she hadn’t been able to drink its nectar, I knew she would have appreciated the beautiful blossoms. 

One of the flowers had dropped some of its central petals, leaving a small depression where I gently placed Poppy’s body, and left her resting atop the burgeoning seed heads. The arrangement held her like a departed queen on the royal funeral bier. I left her there, bathed in the glow of the morning sun.

Walking back to the car, I resolved to tell our story, the whole of it.

Chris Carrel is a writer of speculative fiction writer and other odd things from somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. He has been published at Literally Stories, JAKE, and others, has work forthcoming at Does It Have Pockets?, Dark Winter Lit and Skeleton Flowers, and posts occasionally at ccarrel.bsky.social.