Spanish needles

Fiction. Bidens alba is a real weed. This lot is made up.

The lot sat between a tire place and a house with no curtains.

Someone had mowed it on Monday. The city or a landlord or a man with a trailer. The stems lay in pale rows. The ground showed through, sand and bottle glass and the black plastic of an old weed barrier that never worked.

By Thursday the Bidens were open again.

Spanish needles do not wait for permission. They flower on what is left of a stem. They flower in the tire ruts. They flower in the strip the mower could not reach against the fence. White rays, yellow centers, a smell that is not sweet so much as useful.

The foragers found them the way they find anything in Orlando after a cut: they check the waste ground first.

A scout had been here before the blades. She came back to a shorter field and the same yellow. She landed on a head that had opened overnight. Nectar. Pollen on the face of the disc. She took both. Famine food is still food. The hive does not rank flowers by how much a gardener hates them.

More bees arrived. The lot filled with a sound that did not carry to the road. Cars went by on the arterial. A bus stopped, sighed, left. Nobody looked at the weeds.

Spanish needles keep a calendar the city does not print. In a dearth, when the cabbage palms are done and the citrus is long finished, Bidens is what is left. It blooms in heat. It blooms after rain. It blooms after the mower, because the mower is only an argument, not an ending.

A nurse at the hive would never see this lot. She would taste the forage when it came in and store it. Gold from a plant people pull with gloves. The honey from Bidens is not a prize ribbon. It is winter stores in a town that pretends it has no winter.

One forager worked a strip along the fence where the blades had skipped. The plants there were tall, sticky, already making the barbed seeds that hitch on socks. She did not care about the seeds. She cared about the open centers.

A lizard watched from a cinder block and did not hunt. Too much sun. Too much I-4 heat even this far from the interstate, the air sitting on the sand like a lid.

Afternoon stacked up the usual clouds. The bees kept at it. They know the rain by the light, by the drop in the wind, by the way the lot goes dull. They filled and left and came back. The wasted ground paid in small loads.

When the first fat drops hit the asphalt at the tire place, the remaining foragers lifted as one decision. They ran for the hive. The Bidens stayed open in the rain, white and yellow and unbothered, which is the whole trick of a weed.

The next morning the lot looked the same. Sand. Glass. Rows of cut stems. Flowers anyway.

The scout put it on the map again. Nobody had to vote. The hive already knew: when the pretty trees quit, go to the vacant lot.