One from the vault. The Honey Pit, by me.
The Honey Pit
Darla lay on the old quilt in the field. The summer flowers bobbed in a light breeze that didn’t seem to make the air any less thick around her. She reached her hand out and snapped a daisy from its stem. Its yellow center stared at her like a glowing eye. She tried to count all the flowers within the flower, but the sun washed out her eyes. Darla played “he loves me, he loves me not” in silence wondering if Marcus had fallen into the river.
“I feel like being submerged in honey,” she said to no one in particular, “I think it would feel nice like a liquid second skin.”
“It would be hard to breathe oxygen that way,” Marcus said from a distance.
Darla hadn’t thought he heard her. She had hoped, but wasn’t counting on it. He could be aloof sometimes and she never knew when that would be.
“Well, I won’t put my head under. I will just go in up to my neck.”
“Ok,” he said as he walked closer, ”I’ll look out for sharks.”
“Are you a shark?” she questioned.
“No, but I’ll stand here ready to hit them with an oar if they come after you. I’ll just stand here outside the honey pit while you bath.” He remarked with a small smile perching on the ends of his lips as if he were imagining her in the thick, amber liquid sticking to herself.
She liked that smile on his face. She felt connected to it. Connected with everything around her and she didn’t know why. Maybe that was the most amazing part about the smile. It transcended everything she couldn’t name.
Darla closed her eyes and swam in that honey pit, arms moving in slow motion and legs scissoring, but not cutting anything but time. Her naked flesh invited the honey to live on her. She opened her mouth and tasted it. It was so sweet and natural that it choked her. Darla thought it was so opposite with the rest of the world that she knew day to day. Everything sour and plastic and impossibly manmade. There was nothing she could attach herself to that didn’t hurt or leave an aftertaste in her mouth.
She heard Marcus’ feet shift stance in the grass. He always wore inappropriate shoes. He liked to feel like every step reminded him to be alive. Sometimes suffering made him feel alive. She couldn’t understand this fully, but accepted it was part of what she loved about him.
“You will have to hose me off when I am done in the honey.”
“My pleasure.”
Dar stood up from the blanket slowly like she were rising from the pit and dripping the culmination of a bee’s life. She was right about it feeling like a second skin. It pulled at her flesh as it slid onto the grass leaving her feet in pools of gold. Darla imagined she had been touched by Midas and felt precious for just a second. She stood there with her arms out in an airplane and blindly smiled into the sun.
“You look like you have had a rebirth,” he said softly.
“This is a sweeter life,” Dar said.
I will be sweet by osmosis, she thought, and I will smell like candy and glow like summer peaches on the bough and be filled with nectar. With her eyes closed and arms still out at her sides, she felt Marcus come closer. Darla could feel him in her space. She could feel the heat of his dark colors, of his sadness reach out like fingers.
She put her arms down but didn’t open her eyes. She wanted to stay in this place where he would venture to get this close. “I would lie in the grass under the sun and sleep by the river; I would listen to the frogs singing and hum along. The crickets would hop from blade to blade above my head and in my dream would move like the undulation of water.”
“Perfect,” Marcus whispered only inches from her mouth. He wanted to kiss those lips. He wanted to taste that dream Darla was weaving, but he didn’t know how.
“Maybe you would leave your shark hunting post long enough to come and sit by the river with me and watch lesser fish.” She reached out and put her fingers on his mouth smearing honey across it.
“All fish are great.”
Aleathia Drehmer
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