“When a bee-master dies, funeral biscuits soaked in wine are put in front of the hives so the bees may partake of their master’s funeral feast.”

— Household Tales With Other Traditional Remains, Sidney Oldell Addy, 1895

Afterwards I take the train and cross the river to the exam hall. I should stay in the carriage until a nearer stop, but a man glares at me for crying so I get off at Waterloo and walk. And so it begins. The life bureaucracy that comes after a death. The awakening in wet sheets, heart sinking and settling into all else drowned. I’m walking and all around me I hear the sound of cannons — carried violence in a child’s laugh and a mother’s scold and the chime of that big ugly clock. You weren’t you — too thin, too serious. I’m going to be late. If I fail this exam nobody here would care. The only ones who do are back home, bated breath and vicarious hope. The angle of your mouth — unnaturally prim. Later I learn they’d wired your jaw shut so it wouldn’t fall open. People are swarming the cloakroom and I haven’t brought my book. Silence in the royal horticultural hall. The sun leaks jaundiced through the ceiling as everyone starts scribbling, stuttered rustle of pages, annotated oracles consulted. I have to go by memory. Once they called Artemis Bee. Did you know? The soul spilled murmurous from her as an insect cloud. Once they believed in birthing bees from ox carcasses. The life of the bull passed into that of the bees, sudden and unquestioned. Where have you gone? Into whom has your life passed? Let me tell you something else I learned from Virgil. Honey, at first, is like water. It thickens as it ages, as it sweetens. When I visited your mother last week she handed me a tear-open packet of ginseng honey. My fingers brushed against hers, which once cradled your skull fresh and sticky from the womb. How lucky, I think. How sweet.