The screened porch

Fiction. Screened porches are common in Orlando. This porch and this bee are made up.

The porch sat on the east side of a small house, the kind with a lime in the side yard and a hose that leaked.

The door was a sliding screen. It hung up on the track the way they all do. People left it open in the morning for the air, then forgot. Afternoon rain would remind them. Until then, the porch was a room that pretended to be outside.

A forager had been on the lime. Thin nectar, late in the bloom. She lifted, looking for the next thing, and caught a smell that did not belong to a flower. Sweet. Wrong. A can of soda knocked on its side under a chair, sticky on the painted floor, already drawing ants.

She went in.

Bees will take a spill. It is sugar. The hive does not audit the source if the source pays. She landed on the wet edge of the can and drank. The ceiling fan ticked. A cat on a cushion opened one eye and closed it. The cat had seen bees. The cat had a job that did not include this.

The person came out with a basket of laundry and slid the screen shut because the air had gone heavy. West already the color of wet concrete. The forager was on the can. The person did not see her. The latch clicked.

Now the porch was a cage with good light.

The forager finished and lifted for home. She hit the screen. That is the first chapter of every bee-on-a-porch story, and it is always the same. Screen looks like air. Screen is not air. She buzzed the mesh. She walked it. She tried a corner. The mesh had the smell of old dust and a little rust.

The person saw her then and did the human thing, which was to flap a towel. The forager dropped, came back, hit the screen again. The cat left the cushion. The towel did not help. Towels never help. They turn a lost bee into a frightened bee.

Rain arrived, the wall, the hammer on the screen roof. Water sheeted off the eaves. The lime vanished. The forager clung to the mesh and became a small dark comma. Inside the house, the person watched the rain and the bee and made a calculation about stings versus weather.

The rain lasted the usual eighteen minutes.

When it thinned, the person did the other human thing, which was better. Opened the screen two feet. Stepped back. Left the towel on the chair. The forager did not go at once. She had a map that said this room was wrong, and maps last. She walked the mesh toward the new gap. She found it. She left, low, over the lime, through steam rising off the sand, toward a hive that had already counted her late.

Guards at the notch tasted rain and soda and let her in. A nurse took what little she had, which was not much, and was still sugar.

On the porch the person wiped the can and set it in the indoor bin. The cat returned to the cushion. The fan ticked. The screen stayed cracked until the steam died, which was a kind of manners.

The forager went out later, in the bright after, and worked Spanish needles in the lot. She did not go back to the porch. The spill was gone. The lime was still there. The screen, from the air, looked like air again, and she did not believe it twice.