The Invention of Flight Read Free

the book, holding the edges of the book tightly. He talks and she reads and finally he looks at her and is puzzled. He gets up and moves slowly out of the room, his legs so thin. In a while he’s back with two bowls of dry cereal and two spoons. He hands one to her and says, “The milk I forgot,” and she says, “Thank you,” and begins to eat the cereal as it is without offering to go and get milk. Again he is puzzled, but he eats it that way too, his mouth slightly open and crunching loudly.
    He finishes eating and sits with the bowl resting on his knees. He plays at trying to balance the spoon on his middle finger. “I tell you about bees,” he says. “The workers all female.” She looks this up in the book and finds that yes, this is true. Her father had taught her how to care for the bees and gather the honey, how to find the old queen and replace her in the spring with a new one that would arrive in the mail in a small wooden box with a screen, but he had not told her much about the bees themselves, how they lived their lives. The old man turns in his chair to look out the window. The cereal bowl falls to the carpet, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He begins a story about Jamaica, a family he lived with for a while when he was ill, the meals they served and the color of the ocean there, the design onthe wallpaper in his room, the taste of breadfruit.
Queen bees
, she reads,
can lay eggs and hatch them without any fertilization. All the unfertilized eggs will be drones, male bees. The fertile ones become workers.
She looks up drones.
Their sole purpose in life is to mate with the queen. All of the drones leave the hive with the queen on her wedding flight. One of them mates with her and he dies. He is not killed by the queen, as is often thought, but he dies at the moment of intrusion due to the structure of his own body. The queen rips herself away from the dead drone and in the process takes part of his organs with her. She then is able to fertilize the eggs as well as lay them.
He runs his fingers along a slick pinkish scar on his arm. “Fishing,” he says and leans his head back on the chair. “I want to fish.” There is a picture in the book of fat drones gorged with honey lying on the ground outside the hive where they have been turned out to die. This happens in the fall or sometimes in mid-summer after the first honey flow between apple bloom and white clover.
He has no baskets on his legs in which to carry pollen and his tongue is so unsuited to the gathering of honey from flowers that he might starve to death in the midst of a clover field in full bloom.
    She puts the book down on the sofa and stands up, walks away from him and to the other window. The sky is clear and the sun just setting, the window glass filling with a deep blue. She looks over at him, his head still back, mumbling, needing to be bathed, to be fed. She feels giddy, is ashamed of what she feels. I could turn you out, she thinks, and my life would be mine. No more sea stories. The house would be quiet. She goes across the room to him and says, “He’s dead, you know, he’s nothing, not any place.” And then she feels morefrightened than she has ever felt before. She puts her arms around his neck, so fragile, and she says, “What kind of life is this, Papa?” and he puts his hand on her hair and says nothing.

Rondo
    The wife of a pianist with hair to her waist leans too close to a candle and for an instant the spray of hair burns and glows like hot wires, filaments in glass. The pianist is sitting in the corner by another candle, in conversation with an androgynous cornet player who feels that she is in some way carrying on a secret though spiritual affair with the pianist right under his wife’s eyes, because they are of course talking on a much higher plane than the pianist could ever hope to reach with his wife, who is much too pretty and too blatantly