Rain at three

Fiction. Central Florida storms are real. This hive is made up.

By two the sky over Orlando still looked like work weather.

The foragers were out. One on a lime in a side yard. One on Bidens along a ditch. A cluster of them in a cabbage palm that had a few cream heads left, loud even in the heat. The air over I-4 shimmered. A bus stop bench ticked as it expanded.

At two-twenty the west went the color of wet concrete.

Central Florida does this in the warm months. The Atlantic holds its blue. The Gulf builds a wall. The wall walks east. You can watch it from a screened porch and time your errands. Bees do not watch from porches. They watch with their bodies.

The first sign is not rain. It is the light going flat. Then the wind, a push that smells like wet pavement before the pavement is wet. Then the swallows, if there are swallows, cutting lower.

A forager on the lime broke off mid-flower. She had a partial load. Partial is better than a wet death in the grass. She lifted, took a heading, and ran.

The wall was visible now, a gray sheet with a hard front. Rain in this town does not drizzle toward you. It arrives as a building.

Along the ditch the Bidens bees rose in a scatter. One of them was heavy. She flew lower than the others, a straight line over saw palmetto scrub and a fence and the dumpster behind a strip mall. A drop hit her thorax. Another. She kept the line.

At the hive the guards had already changed their math. Incoming foragers hit the landing board in a hurry. The notch took them as fast as it could. A few stacked up. Nobody waited politely. There is no politely in a storm.

Thunder rolled over Conway, over the lake, over the whole flat county at once.

The wall reached the side yard. The lime vanished in rain. Water sheeted off the eaves and hammered the sand. A cabbage palm across the street thrashed its fans. The air cooled ten degrees in a minute, which in August feels like a door opening.

One forager did not make it to the board. She dropped under the hive stand, crawled the wet wood, and waited out the first hard minutes in the lee of a cinder block. She would climb when the rain thinned. She was not dramatic about it. She was wet and alive.

Inside, the colony closed ranks without a speech. Foragers unloaded what they had. Nurses took nectar. The sound of the hive changed, a tighter hum, more bodies on comb, fewer at the entrance. Ventilation bees still fanned. Rain on a lid is loud if you are small.

The storm lasted eighteen minutes, which is a long time if you are a bee under a block and a short time if you are a person who parked under an overpass.

Then it moved east, toward the coast, dragging a bright edge behind it. Steam lifted off the asphalt. The bus stop bench dripped. The ditch ran a brown trickle.

The forager under the stand climbed. Guards tasted her, rain and all, and let her in.

Twenty minutes after that the lime was in sun again. Spanish needles in the lot held beads of water and still offered a center. The cabbage palm shook itself.

The foragers went back out.

That is the afternoon in this town. Work. A wall. Work again. The hive does not keep a grudge against the sky. It keeps a memory of how little time you get between the heat and the rain.