The Honey Month

by Amal El-Mohtar

  THE HONEY MONTH

  by Amal El-Mohtar

  for Danielle Sucher & Cat Valente

  Cheeky Frawg Books

  Tallahassee, Florida

  Copyright © 2010, 2011 Amal El-Mohtar.

  Introduction copyright © 2010 Danielle Sucher.

  Cover Art copyright © Jeremy Zerfoss.

  Cheeky Frawg logo copyright © 2011 by Jeremy Zerfoss.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  First published in 2010 in Great Britain by Papaveria Press, an imprint of Circle Six.

  All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  Check out the full line of Cheeky Frawg Books at:

  www.cheekyfrawg.com

  INTRODUCTION

  I met Amal in passing, a whirl of energy and glee at a small convention where Cat Valente was the guest of honor and I was catering the VIP suite. They say you know your best friends better within five minutes of meeting them than you know other people after twenty years of knowing each other, and maybe they’re right, because we were off and running from the start. Next thing you know, I sent her thirty some odd vials of honey, little licks to sample and taste and write her impressions upon. I never dreamed what she could do with such meager inspiration. But remember, we’d only just met. I know better now.

  She wrote her honey girls a day at a time during that February, the month Cat’s novel Palimpsest came out. And every day I thought of the smell of beeswax and the buzzing that comes when you work with bees. I thought of the hives Roger keeps in the backyard of his church up in the Bronx, with smoke from leaves he saves each autumn to calm the ladies whenever he works with them, and the honey extractor down in the rectory basement. I thought of girls I’d known and been and wanted to meet and thought I could fall in love with, of stings I’ve felt and kisses I’d ached for.

  She tracked my life with this project, perhaps more than she ever realized along the way. All of these honeys had lives before my pantry, overwritten by my finding and gathering of them, overwritten by their lives in tiny vials flown across the sea, overwritten again by Amal’s impressions of them and the gorgeous worlds inside her that she shares with us.

  About five years ago, I got it into my head that I wanted to keep bees. Beekeeping was illegal in NYC at the time, though, which posed a bit of a hurdle for me. I knew some folks did it anyway, but hadn’t a clue how to find them. But life’s not so complicated, and these things are doable. I called a friendly stranger out of the blue, met up with some urban agriculture organizations, and started hassling local politicians at parties. It gained momentum, as these things do—when I read about November’s bees in Palimpsest, I thought they were the dream of mine.

  My parents offered to let me keep a hive out in their house near Sag Harbor, by the bay. The bees could dine on beach plums and peach blossoms, and all the wild flowering things that grow up out of the silt. I declined on account of the commute, but the dream of it came back to me when I read Amal’s vignette on the 3rd day of the honey month. How could she have known I almost kept bees by that harbor myself? I knew I would have to print these out and bring them to the beekeeper who now sells her honey in Sag Harbor, who always asks after my mother, who gives me tastes of honey on toothpicks, a lick at a time. Now, I look back on the thought of winter and anticipate dusting for Varroa mites by sprinkling powdered sugar over the hive, snow bees rising up into the air covered in a different kind of sweetness.

  All I remember about my first bee sting is that I was with my grandmother on our way to the bus. The one near the good falafel place, I think, or a block that looked a lot like the falafel block from my little kid point of view. We were standing at the corner waiting for the light to change so we could cross, not far from a garbage can stinking in the summer heat. I don’t remember the pain of it; I just remember crying endlessly as my grandmother scraped a butter knife across my skin to get the stinger out, and bathed the offending area in vinegar to end the pain.

  I thought of that moment on the 23rd day, when the tart cherry girl walks away from the boy who smells of tobacco and molasses. Tobacco is an old folk remedy for bee stings, you see, to end the pain. Would he have ended her pain? Or did she do well to lose the courage to confront him? I don’t know. I only know what it’s like to be that girl, trying to rely on the strength of my want, and ultimately fearing to approach the boys who never saw me or wondered at my name.

  The 15th day brought me back to Hungary, where my grandmother was born. She lost more than a ring to that country, stolen first by the Nazis and hounded out again by the Communists. She survived Auschwitz. She bargained her husband back from generals with sacks of grain and a baby on her hip, a young wife barely free from imprisonment and starvation herself. She fought her way out. But I have never seen her look so young and happy as when we went back to visit the little towns where she grew up, fifty years or so after she left.

  Her old house was stolen when she fled the country. When we returned, it had become a post office. My frail old grandmother marched straight up to the postal worker behind the window and declared to her in furious Hungarian, “This is my house!” (I suspect I’ve bowdlerized her language a bit in paraphrasing from memory.) She never did lack for courage. And she never did get her house back.

  Our stories are so similar and so intertwined, Amal’s and mine. My family’s home was stolen from them, in a nightmare that has echoed through our lives down the generations; Amal’s loved ones have had their homes and lives stolen as well, in a story too similar for comfort. There is a damaged palimpsest between us, rewritten again and again until nothing is legible and nothing is right. As Amal put it, our people’s palms are too full of thorns to hold hands, even though they match.

  The Honey Month isn’t about that conflict, and I don’t want to get too sidetracked by it here. But I want you to understand this: every honey has its story, and if some of those stories are darker and more complicated than we might like, so be it. The 11th day tells both our stories. Our only choice is where to take them next.

  As for me, after five years of wanting, waiting, and fighting for legalization, I’m finally setting up my first hive this spring. Forty thousand fuzzy little pets to love and call my own and suffer for with sticky sweetness and poison and death, alarm pheromones that smell like angry bananas, and one stately slave queen doing her work at the bidding and tolerance of the rest.

  I reread all the poems and stories that follow before sitting down to write this introduction, and found for the first time after reading them together that Amal had presented my life back to me as reflected by her own strange facets. I hadn’t realized that day by day she was rewriting me without either of us noticing what was happening there. And now that she has, I can’t help but think that there is no one I’d trust more to do it.

  It is an honor to reach out and hold her hand.

  –Danielle Sucher

  DAY 1

  Fireweed Honey

  Smell: Slightly resinous, warm, not very strong.

  Colour: Mellow gold, an almost “typical” honey colour—what you’d imagine saying “honey tones” would mean, referring to hair or wood.

  Taste: Gentle. Very similar to clover honey, but not quite as sweet: mellow, kind. No unusual notes; all I can think is “mm, honey,” but without that extra quality that makes me so keenly understand the line from Romeo and Juliet where honey is “loathsome in its own deliciousness,” where the sweetness takes on an added dimension so different from sugar, in a way that scrunches your nose when you’re a child but closes your eyes when you’re grown up. If I were to attempt to b
e sophisticated I’d say it was understated. Delicious, all the same.

  Come to me, she said, and I will plait fireweed into your hair. When you laugh, it will gleam like wheat in sunlight, and when you weep, it will sweeten your tears until hummingbirds are drawn to sip them. Only come to me, and be my love, for I am so alone, and there is no one to tend the hives with me, no one to tip the moon-water from my well, no one to hold my hand in the dark. The night is cold and the moon is colder, and my sisters have all forgotten me.

  So spoke the star-girl, many years fallen, when I dreamed of her that night.

  I had gone to bed with my left arm throbbing. I was rooting around in the spice cupboard when I cried out, yanked my hand back in surprise; a bee had been wintering there, had stung me just above the wrist, and now wriggled in her death throes between jars of honey and cinnamon. I had never been stung before, and marvelled at how much it hurt.

  It seemed cruel to let her suffer, but I couldn’t bring myself to mangle her any further. I scooped her up, dropped her out on the windowsill, and went to find some garlic to rub on the sting.

  I thought the dream was the garlic’s fault, at first.

  There was a mountain in the distance, and a glowing at its foot. I walked towards it, as one does in dreams, and found I could smell heat, a smell like warm water and beeswax candles, that grew stronger the closer I got. Soon I began to see strange bushes all around, a gold-green spread along the mountain’s edge, full of rust-red flowers that glowed against the darkness.

  It took me a moment to notice the girl by the well. She did not smile at me. She didn’t look as if she could.

  Her skin was pale as quartz, clear and clouded in the same way; her eyes were like water, and shone painfully. She had no hair, no eyebrows, but her face was perfect, cabochon-smooth, and she was crying.

  It is pointless to say she was beautiful. It cannot mean what I want it to mean. When I looked at her I wanted both to touch her and watch her from a distance, to hold her and hide from her, to kiss her and ask her to forgive me—for what, I couldn’t say, except that she looked so sad.

  She did it, she said. Tears shone against her cheeks. She found someone. Stay longer, next time, please?

  Before I could answer her, I woke up.

  It was still dark out. I got out of bed, made myself some tea. I couldn’t say what it was about the star-lady that had shaken me. It was so hard to remember dreams, usually, but this one followed me from home to work and back again. I crawled into bed early, wanting the dream back, but didn’t hope for it too strongly. On the rare occasions I’d dreamed something beautiful—the beginning of an adventure, the opening of a novel beckoning me on to the next chapter—it was impossible, no matter how much I willed it, to pick up the thread I’d dropped.

  I had no trouble this time.

  You came back, she said, and I melted to see her almost smile, to see hope kindle in her adamantine eyes. She thorned you deep. Will you stay?

  I tried to ask her name, who she was, but the dream-speech tangled in my mouth, threatened to wake me if I forced it. She understood.

  I fell. We must guard against the slightest fall, against even the thought of it; a fall is never slight to us. Something in us is always wanting the plunge, the speed, the disgrace, and once we taste weightlessness we become gluttons for it.

  I was very beautiful, then, with my eight-pointed hair bound up in fireweed. My sisters called me their little opal, though they were all so much lovelier than me. I was playing a chase-game with them when I tripped against this mountain’s tip, back when mountains still grew and sought to tickle us in our beds. I tripped, and the falling had me, and all my eight-pointed hair burned behind me, and my fireweed too, except for one bit, one tiny bit I kept clutched in my fist for all that it hurt so sharp.

  I planted it. I watered it with kisses and tears and moon-slicked water from this well, and it grew to heat and brightness again. I tried to climb up the mountain, but by the time I was halfway up it had forgotten how to grow, gone drowsy, began to decline. All things seek to fall, in time. It is not nearly tall enough for me now, and I am trapped, and alone, save for my fireweed, my bees, and this well. The bees love the moon-water; it is sweeter than sugar. Will you help me feed them?

  How could I not?

  I never thought to ask, then, how I could stay with her when I was bound to wake up. I never thought to wonder how I would rearrange my life to live less and sleep more, that I might draw her moon-water and feed her bees, that I might kiss her cool cheeks and tell her stories. I never thought, and I should have, because here I am, still, and I wonder if I can wake up now, wonder if I am laid out in my bed with someone knocking at the door I can’t answer, wonder if it will take someone to suck the sting from my wrist before I can leave.

  I don’t know. It’s always night, here, and she is always so beautiful. The hummingbirds, too. They never seem to leave.

  DAY 2

  Peach Creamed Honey

  Colour: Pale and cloudy, like lemonade.

  Smell: Rather unpleasant; sweaty underthings, but with a hint of lemon beyond it.

  Taste: Oh, so delicious. Sweet, syrup-sweet, thick and sugary. I have to think of peaches to discern a peachy flavour; it comes out at the back of my mouth, the top of my throat. It’s a mischievous honey, sexy and wry.

  They say

  she likes to suck peaches. Not eat them, suck them,

  tilt her head back and let the juice drip

  sticky down her chin, before licking, sucking,

  swallowing the sunshine of it down. They say

  she likes to tease her fruit, bite ripe summer flesh

  just to get that drip going

  down, down,

  sweets her elbow with the slip of it,

  wears it like perfume.

  I say

  she’s got a ways to go yet, that girl,

  just a blossom yet herself, still bashful ‘round the bees. I say

  no way a girl can tease like that

  who’s been bit into once or twice.

  So I come ‘round with just a little bit of honey,

  just a little, little lick, just enough to catch her eye,

  creamed peach honey, just the thing to bring her by.

  And I know she’ll let me tell her how the peaches lost their way

  how they fell out of a wagon on a sweaty summer’s day,

  how the buzz got all around that there was sugar to be had,

  and the bees came singing, and the bees came glad.

  They sucked—she’ll blush—I’ll tell her, they sucked that fruit right dry,

  ‘till it all got tangled up in the heady humming hive.

  They made it into honey and they fed it to their queen,

  and she shivered with the sweet, and she licked the platter clean,

  and she dreamed of sunny meadows and she dreamed of soft ice cream—

  I’ll see her lick her lips, and I’ll see her bite a frown,

  and I’ll see how she’ll hesitate, look from me up to the town

  and back, and she’ll swallow, and she’ll say “can I try?”

  and I’ll offer like a gentleman, won’t even hold her eye.

  Because she’ll have to close them, see. She’ll have to moan a bit.

  and it’s when she isn’t looking

  when she’s sighing fit to cry,

  that I’ll lick the loving from her,

  that I’ll taste the peaches on her

  that I’ll drink the honey from her

  suck the sweet of her surprise.

  DAY 3

  Sag Harbor, NY, Early Spring Honey

  Colour: Pale and clear as snowmelt, just about as much colour as a Riesling.

  Smell: The colour must be affecting me—but, crystals, cool sugar crystals. If honey were water. As I pull it out of the imp, I think of a stingless jellyfish I once held in the palm of my hand, in Oman. Very faint hint of citrus, too, but more grapefruit than lemon.

&nbs
p; Taste: This honey tastes like winter. No—it tastes like the end of winter, but not quite spring. It tastes like those days where you can still see clumps of snow on the ground and the air is heavy with damp but it all smells so good because snowmelt is like that, the trees are black and fragrant though they’ve barely begun to bud. Refreshing; the sweetness isn’t cloying, it’s faint and gentle and almost an afterthought. My favourite so far.

  Not every harbour has a hive, but those that do are wise enough to know themselves blessed.

  It cannot be too salty a harbour; it must be at the widening mouth of a river trying to swallow the sea. It must drink the rising, not the setting, sun. It must bear boats safely into it, look calmly into the eyes of a storm and tell it that while it may bluster the trees, it may not ruffle the waters. Suppose it should spoil the honey and make it taste of sturm und drang?

  The gathering happens in the spring, of course, the early spring. That is the time for coaxing sweetness from the world: sap from trees, scent from flowers. It needs to be tapped, needs to be gently drawn from its winter bed like a child on a chilly morning, sand in the lashes, dreams in the eye. It does not yet know itself to be sweetness; it is a snowdrop, not a rose.

  So it happens in the early spring that the harbour bees skim the water, and wait. The water is cold; it does not happen quickly. But eventually, oh! So slowly, the surface stretches like a skin, parts along the silky hair of a harbour-maid. Her eyes are the colour of dawn on the water, her mouth is a single lily, its five pale petals stretching along her cheeks, her chin, tickle her nose. The bee exults, carefully gathers what the girl will give while keeping its wings free of the water, and dances the news to the hive.

  Slowly, slowly, other heads rise, other flower-mouthed girls with hair like snow, and the bees travel from one to the next, sipping the river nectar and weaving it into their hive. The girls smile with their eyes, thank the bees for their service—and when the bees have wriggled their gifts from each to each, the girls will sink back down into the water, close up the petals of their mouths, and dream of the bud-lipped children they will bear come fall.