Miah understands the Honey of Dreams like this: a batch of bee larvae are fed royal jelly to make them queens, but this royal jelly is bioengineered by the geniuses at the Hive of Dreams with an enchanting formula—a dash of a woozy sedative and a splash or two of a pleasure enhancer.
When the queens hatch, their peach fuzz shimmers like a mirage, and the worker babies they make all inherit the Hive of Dreams’ chemical cocktail, simmering in their gut to ferment soothing lamb’s ear honey that induces dreams. The Hive of Dreams website claims that tandem dreaming is possible with their honey, especially for couples and roommates and friends who share the same honey and sleep in the same space. The Hive of Dreams offers a stimulant for tandem dreaming: a video dredged with mild subliminal messages and fried in binaural beats, and a series of prompts. Sit in front of each other and hold hands. Listen to a song that captures the tonal or emotional essence that you hope your dream will deliver. Outline the desired landscape/setting of your dream, and agree on 3-4 images to appear in it. Discuss a flavor (taste is linked closely to memory). Tell each other what you really want. It’s okay to not know or to lie, as long as you wonder what the answer might be. Your brain will take care of the rest.
Miah’s friend Lindsay explains all of this after they spend the evening at the Cyclebar in West Hartford, while they eat the asparagus stuffed chicken that Christopher cooked for dinner.
“You and Chris should try it,” Lindsay encourages, cutting into the chicken where the asparagus sticks out like bone. “You lovebirds are always scheming to go on another honeymoon. Dream about a trip to Greece or something.
When Miah and Christopher first started dating, before they graduated from the high school they both attended in Manhattan, Kansas, they would meet in the fields overlooking the lake and vape stupid flavors like glazed donut and skinny dip in hidden offshoots of the lake. They would sit on towels in the grass to dry off at sunset and rub lotion or vaseline over each other’s shivering skin while the blonde grass and lemonade sky turned strawberry. During the week, they barely ate lunch and picked up chicken fries from Burger King after school for dinner. Being foodies, they dreamed up elaborate menus for the weekend: enchiladas smothered in salsa verde, cold caesar salad, all kinds of curries, shortribs, honey dew pearls on frozen yogurt. It was around this time that Christopher first learned how to cook. He tried braising fish, smoking parsnips, and creating pasta sauces with too much dried oregano and the anchovies soaked in olive oil that his mom kept in the fridge. Miah directed and advised him in the kitchen, even though she didn’t know the first thing about cooking. He was grateful for it anyway, to know that he had a person who cared enough to be involved in his hobbies and to guide him.
Christopher’s proposal came the October after they graduated high school, in the form of a diamond ring warm in his mouth when he kissed her, pushed under Miah’s tongue with his own.
Miah and Christopher don’t dream about a trip to Greece. They don’t get a choice. The way that the Honey of Dreams works is that it brings subconscious desires to the surface so that dreams have a warm, moist place to bloom. The first time they take the honey, they eat it plain from a tablespoon before bed. It’s April, so they also take a spoonful of local pollen to help with their allergies. After they eat the honey, Christopher says he can taste a faint apple flavor, but Miah can’t. Before she falls asleep, Miah does see an apple—peeled like an orange, flayed, white flesh glistening with juice, strips of skin dangling from it like a necklace of leaves.
When Miah and Christopher surface in the dream, they are in front of a doorway.
Through the door, the lights are syrupy, the dance floor is lit up red—the color of the sun through closed eyes—and hexagonal capsules climb up the walls. There is a warm bakery smell coming through, but there is something bitter behind it, animal.
“Name?” the bouncer asks.
“Christopher. Miah’s Christopher.”
“We have you reserved for room 31. Angela will take you there,” the bouncer says.
A woman with big dark eyes like insect eyes leads them through the club to the back wall, up a set of steps and into one of the hexagonal capsules. Inside it’s warm and misty and alongside the pulsing beat and pitter-patter of music downstairs is a drowsy hum. There’s a table dressed with a loose crocheted sheet that looks to be made of jelly, and atop that is a tray of little glasses full of clear liquid. There’s a bench on one side of the table and a few scoop chairs on the other side and sitting in one of the chairs is a girl.
Christopher’s mother lived eighteen years of her life rotting in the spring and fall, reviving in the summer and winter. At the beginning of September when Christopher was still in elementary school, his mom curled her hair everyday and hosted dinner parties on Saturday with the girls she played tennis with. She would wear chandelier earrings and set up cheese and salami boards, pretty string lanterns, and pitchers of cold tea with berries in it. When her friends arrived, she would sit Christopher on the tall bar stools in the dining room and feed him snacks, while she and her friends giggled about how precious he was.
In late October, she started getting bad. Christopher wouldn't see her friends anymore. He came home from school and his mom would be cold in the bath or cutting open the plastic wrap of a microwave meal, the knife like a scalpel trembling down the middle of its frozen belly. She once fell asleep in the shower, and the crash of her body against the tile was the loudest thing he’d ever heard in his life. When he was eight, he thought that he was a disease because his mom was always sick when he was around. Christopher was sent to live in Omaha with his grandparents in December and again in June. He never spent Christmas with his mom. She never taught him how to grill a hotdog at the lake.
The girl, in many ways, is fairy-like. She has the look and the aura of something that lives in acorns, skips over ponds, was born underneath a leaf in an egg as small as a peppercorn. Everything about her is pale, her eyes are pink like strawberry milk, and freckles clump right above her cheekbones.
Miah feels a tugging in her chest that she only ever gets here, in her dreams.
“Hello. Is this your room?” Miah asks.
“This is where they told me to go,” the girl answers.
“Us, too,” Christopher says.
Miah crosses the room, Christopher following as usual, and sits on the bench in front of the girl. “What are these?” she asks, nodding toward the drinks.
“These?” the girl repeats. “They’re sweet.”
Christopher reaches out and takes one of the glasses. The dips of his hand sink in and his tendons loom below the light, giving him stripes. When he takes a sip and smiles a few degrees warmer than polite with doughy eyes, the girl tilts her head hopefully.
There’s a moment when Miah feels like she’s being left behind.
Miah also takes a drink. It tastes like sticky buns.
The girl’s eyes follow her, and Miah feels the kind of flattery that a worm feels when it is taken from the dirt and squished into food. To need and be needed, the way it has always worked. The flowers need the bees and the bees need the flowers and if one dies then so does the other.
“What are your names?” the girl asks.
Miah answers first, watching for the girl’s smile afterward. Christopher answers second, and the girl looks between them, analyzing and drifting closer before pulling back curiously.
“What’s your name?” Miah asks.
“I’m Lamb. And I really hope we can be friends.”
Christopher is struck by Lamb’s words. She suddenly seems so lonely sitting there in that chair, beautiful and sad and interested.
“Of course,” Christopher says. “We’ll be your friend. We can be your best friend.”
Lamb lights up. “Come over to my apartment?” she asks.
Christopher’s heart stalls, but Miah beats him to answer. “Okay.”
When Lamb stands up, her necklace unclasps and spills on the ground. Christopher, always the gentleman, hastily retrieves the necklace and holds it out to her. But she turns away, gathering her hair over her shoulder to reveal the back of her neck as soft as the stem of a mushroom. He loops his arms around her body, pulling the chain of the necklace against her skin. His fingers shake while he tries to clasp the necklace. He always shakes when he tries to clasp Miah’s necklaces, too. But this isn’t Miah. He tries to still his hands, and his chest suddenly feels unripe; firm and unyielding, and the consistency does not permit his lungs to expand.
“Chris,” Miah says behind him.
He turns his head, and Miah is of course his guardian still.
“Let me do it,” she offers.
When Miah’s fingers replace his on the necklace, Christopher backs away and sees a remnant of where he had just stood—a pink, him-shaped light—and Miah steps into it.
Miah’s childhood pet was a pink-toed tarantula named Jazzy. One day, Miah found Jazzy on her back, legs curled into her body, fangs glinting in the light like black thorns. Miah was convinced Jazzy was dead. Miah’s mom looked it up on her phone and it turned out that Jazzy was not dead, just molting. And because Miah loved and missed Jazzy so much, she decided to do the merciful thing and offer her help. She found the edges of Jazzy’s exoskeleton just barely peeling off, and she pulled it back clean like a bandaid. And maybe Miah pulled too hard because Jazzy’s leg came with it. Miah screamed and her mom ran in to find a spidery leg on the carpet and Miah’s fingers covered in tarantula trichomes—or less accurately, hairs—that could cause a rash or a trip to the emergency room if she touched her eyes. Her mom forced her into the bathroom and scrubbed her hands raw with soap and water and a sponge. With Jazzy’s mutilated body out of sight, Miah’s mom spoke over her sobs. “Not everybody needs you all the time, Miah.”
But Miah rebelled against this idea.
It smells like wet wood inside Lamb’s apartment, vaguely floral in an authentic, greasy way. Miah had been unaware that breathing could feel so good.
Christopher carries Lamb to the bed. Miah removes Lamb’s socks that go gold and lacy at the top, sticky in Miah’s hands. When Lamb looks at her, Miah thinks, she needs me.
Christopher kisses Lamb's cheek across to her jaw. Miah grabs Lamb’s hips, the spoons of which are velvety soft as pancakes, and lifts them gently, clinically, like guiding a child or animal to take medicine.
When Miah pulls Lamb’s shirt over her head, she is so careful to make sure the fabric does not snag on her arm and twist it off.
Miah’s fingers drift to Lamb’s neck and they leech her warmth there. Then Christopher’s hand is in Lamb’s hair, and Miah reaches out in an automatic way to slot her fingertips in between his ruddy knuckles. And surely she’s touched Christopher before with warm hands, but for some reason, this is the first time she’s noticed touching him and not feeling heat first and instead texture.
Christopher and Miah meet eyes briefly during the affair, and there’s a kind of understanding different than what they have grown to know and expect between each other. It’s an understanding of their deficits and their griefs. In that hot, shimmering room, threads of pity like candy floss tangle and melt between them.
Like the green flash, in the split second before Christopher wakes up, a color he shouldn’t be able to see—polarized and ultraviolet and mouthwatering in a yeasty sort of way—blossoms through the fabric of the dream like something spilled.
Miah’s interest in bugs dissolved in hormones and Jazzy’s death. In its stead grew her love for orange blushes, vintage fashion, foreign designers, and Pinterest, and then Miah’s interest became making a living off of being pretty. She married Christopher, and it was kind of like she succeeded in that. After they moved to Hartford, Christopher became a food content creator. He posted videos making savory seafood waffles with lobster broth instead of water and green onions and octopus, monte cristo sandwiches dusted with powdered sugar over a heart-shaped stencil, crab soup dumplings, and blackened chicken accompanied by stringy mac & cheese and honey-butter jalapeno cornbread. Christopher was the prize that Miah had won, that’s what Christopher’s followers always said.
It started with Miah featuring in his videos sometimes, which generated a lot of traffic to her Instagram, and suddenly makeup brands were sending her moody lipstains, archival collections were loaning her the most gorgeous bags, and she was getting invited to a few of the more lowkey afterparties at New York Fashion Week.
By nature, Christopher and Miah are both jealous people. It might be the lingering heat of love-at-first-sight, their friends pulling them apart while they smile at each other through loops of arms and over shoulders. It might be the way they twist into each other and then away to savor the magnetism that draws them back together. Sometimes Miah talks too much about the men she meets at fashion events or smiles too much when she does. Sometimes Christopher lets girls approach him at the bar and when he bends down so they can talk in his ear, he smiles at Miah. Lindsay once tried to convince Miah that it was toxic, but both Miah and Christopher know that it’s innocent.
When Christopher wakes up the morning after their affair with Lamb, it’s next to Miah. They’re alone in their own bed, but for maybe the first time, there’s a space between them. He turns his head to look at her, his cheek flush against his pillow, and Miah’s face is only this smooth when she sleeps. All night, she has been in their bed and her skin is untouched, and Christopher can’t decide if that’s better or worse. Christopher feels a tickle behind his nose, and when tears begin to swell in his eyes and slide across the bridge of his nose, suddenly Miah’s hand is underneath his shirt, scratching his stomach.
“It’s okay, Christopher,” she says, but her eyes are closed.
“I didn’t know you liked girls,” is the first thing Christopher says to Miah about the whole affair. It’s annoying because the memory of that night has built up in her so much that she thought the smallest tremor would cause all of her insecurities to volcano up and onto him, cooling into her big conclusion that their whole relationship had been an illusion.
When Christopher says that he didn’t know she liked girls, it’s almost 8 PM and they’re eating the Korean food they ordered out on their bed. The food spreads out across the sheets, wobbling whenever they reach to grab something. All of Miah’s anger toward the situation deflates in an instant.
“I’d never thought about it.”
“Do you like girls?”
“Christopher.”
“What?”
“What does it matter?”
“It matters, Miah. It’s like you’ve kept secrets from me.”
“Well, I didn’t know you liked other girls either.”
“I don’t like other girls.”
“Christopher,” she pleads.
“Am I supposed to own up to something?”
“Don’t do anything you don’t want to.”
“Why are you mad at me?”
And for a while, Miah thinks about saying, This is it. Something happened and even though it only happened in a dream, it’s never going to go away so let’s just spare ourselves the pain of peeling apart slowly and sever this now.
Christopher can taste the flavor of the silence and knows that if Miah opens her mouth, something bad will happen.
“How can you say it doesn’t matter if you like girls?”
“How can you say that you don’t like other girls?”
“I didn’t think there was anything like that out there for me,” he replies, voice shaking now. He feels nauseous but can’t stop. He has always tended to use Miah as an avenue to absolution.
“Ok.”
“I thought that it was just us. I never would have thought—”
“Enough.”
“Miah, I’m so mad,” Christopher continues, for once heedless of how he might make Miah feel. “Please forgive me.”
Miah doesn’t say anything. He looks down and sees her hands squeezed into angry, red fists. She closes her eyes and opens her mouth, which is what she does when she’s about to say something painful, and Christopher has to stop this because he started it. He catches a cascade of black bean noodles in his chopsticks and holds it up to Miah’s mouth.
“Eat?” he asks earnestly. “They’re good, right? You like these?”
It’s Miah who brings it up again because Christopher never would. There’s a curiosity that Miah feels, a yearning she has tried to stamp out but that haunts her every night. There are sore spots she wants to press her thumbs into: the pity and shame between her and Christopher like bruises on a banana, somehow making their love under the resentment sweeter. Things haven’t really gone back to normal between them and it’s making her restless, maybe stupid. It’s May and about a month has passed since they met Lamb.
She says, “The Hive of Dreams is having a summer sale.”
And Christopher says, “Ok.”
“The packaging is cute. The wax cover on the jar is designed with honey popsicles and bikinis and bees wearing roller skates.”
“Very pretty.”
“Do you want me to buy us some?”
And Miah has planned for this, makes sure she isn’t looking when he answers.
“If you want,” he says.
Miah has loved Christopher for so long that looking away almost doesn’t make a difference. She can hear the innocent inhale he makes, the trepidation and neutrality in his voice like he is trying not to set off a trap.
Every weekend, Christopher and Miah visit Lamb. Christopher makes toast with peanut butter and the Honey of Dreams, stirs magnesium into juice. They lay down in their bed and emerge at concerts where they sit on picnic blankets and crack acorns open and eat the meat inside that tastes like chocolatey cashews instead of tannins. They sprawl out on the beach and eat donuts covered in sugar and filled with soft, strawberry ice cream that never melts. They kiss and bird-watch, bat-watch, dragon-watch in a steaming Japanese-style hot tub in the wilderness that materializes behind Lamb’s apartment. They cook and the flavor of the food is unreachable when Christopher and Miah wake up.
When Christopher looks at Miah, she gets the same feeling of a cool breeze rushing down her throat and into her lungs as when she’s in a tall place or a fast car, breathtaking and insatiable. It’s comforting that her feelings for Christopher, too, are amplified here and that he has not become just a side character in this.
Lamb eats a lot of pastries, likes being with the trees and the flowers, and always has a twinkle in her eyes, inviting Miah to do something. Lamb stands in the doorway with splinters and scrapes for Miah to tend to, kisses Miah with sweets in her mouth, and has cold skin.
The night is purple outside, witchy, and the rules of dream physics seem to be suspended for at least a while. Lamb and Miah sleep side-by-side, and their hair curls toward and wraps around each other. Christopher braids their hair together, short and black weaving into frizzy and lemon juice blonde, creating a calico textile. Christopher doesn’t know what he’s expecting to see, but it’s not this. Miah and Lamb are completely still, chests unbreathing, faces porcelain. Instead of their own eyelashes, they have identical black bands of eyelashes starting halfway up their eyelids like dolls. He quickly unbraids their hair, but some strands continue to attract each other statically or by some other dream magic. Christopher feels incriminated suddenly. He sits at their feet for a while and wishes for them to wake up and tell him how to earn their forgiveness. But they continue to lie prone and glassy, so he goes to sit alone on Lamb’s couch.
There’s only one time Miah spends time with Lamb without Christopher. They’re at a playground combing through the grass for crickets. It’s freezing out. They climb across the monkey bars and go down the slide to warm up when they stop feeling their fingers, and, somehow, when Lamb scoops into the grass, her palms rise holding a wispy trumpet of honeysuckle mantis, then a translucent beetle filled with organs shining dirty green like peridot, and finally a moth as woolly as a sheep.
“I’ve never seen these before,” Miah says.
“Do you want to hold it?” Lamb asks.
Miah nods, and then she’s holding the sheepy moth, and it’s bundled in a scarf, and it’s furling its proboscis in and out, like a baby clenching and unclenching its little hand. When Miah unravels the moth from its scarf to let it play around the playground, she sees that there’s a thin, balding spot on the left wing, worn down into a tissuey texture.
“Lamb, bring me milkweed and the widest flower petal you can find, wilting so it’s more pliable,” Miah instructs.
When Lamb returns, she’s holding two stems and a skin-like yellow flower petal. Miah snaps the stems and watches the milk bead up like blood. When she applies the milk around the circumference of the moth’s injury, Lamb uses the flat of her pinky nail to pet the moth’s head. “It’s okay, little baby,” she says.
Miah places the flower petal on top of the milk and brushes her finger over it with more milk like glue over paper mache. The petal blends smoothly into the wing like clay. When the operation is complete and dry, the moth takes off, and the light shines through the yellow petal of its wing, now holding a moon while it flies.
Miah looks back to Lamb, and her shirt is off and she has a hole in the middle of her chest. “Help me,” she says.
Miah lays Lamb down, sets a mosaic of leaves, grass, grasshopper wings, strips of Lamb’s shirt, and a rainbow of flower petals over the hole. She looks down at her handiwork, filled with pride, Lamb looking up at her like God, and gets ready to sew.
Christopher is in Lamb's apartment, without Miah somehow, and it’s fungal. Spores float around, seemingly by some engine or instinct like gnats do. There’s perspiration on the ceiling and walls and it smells like apples. Lamb has a spread of fruit on the table and everything is warm and juicy, and Christopher’s suckling milk while he eats. Lamb lies on the rug and when Christopher joins her, headfirst so their ears are almost touching but their legs are so far apart, he notices that the floor is warm, just like everything else in the apartment. The warmth is verging on too much, but it is addictive in that way, like he could lie there forever and never starve or atrophy because the warmth would keep him alive.
Christopher turns his head to look at Lamb, and suddenly they are both very tiny. Lamb stands up and grabs his hand and whisks them underneath her sofa where there is moss and verdant rot and miniscule mushrooms ranging from tangerine orange to heavy cream, all growing among gum wrappers and dust bunnies. Somehow the light down here is twilight-ish and twinkling. There is a party of caterpillars dressed in tinsel and aluminum hats, playing instruments and eating leaves, swaying as if to music that Christopher cannot hear. A caterpillar approaches Christopher and holds out a leaf in its suckery hands. Christopher accepts it and takes a bite and the tender leaf tastes like ham. Lamb offers a hand to him, smiling, and when he takes it, she pulls him into the festive throng, and they dance.
One day, Lindsay sends Miah a link to an ABC article. A girl who went to a Christian college in Indiana killed herself two days ago. Overdose. She was a long-jumper, but she competed for an itty-bitty Christian college in Indiana, meaning she was not a great long-jumper. When she first tried the Honey of Dreams, she told her friends that she went to the Olympics. She said that she felt the air under her superstar thighs like wind under wings. And when she won gold, she stood on the podium with sand printed on her ass and long, firetruck-red acrylics holding up her medal under the jumbo lights. Her parents cried somewhere in the stadium and waved around laminated signs of her face smiling.
A few days after this dream, her parents called and asked in tired voices how her last meet went. She had to tell them that she got fourth, that she had lost to some girl whose competitive record was 6.4 meters, a score she hit during her senior year of high school and then never again. That night, she took a few Benadryl. She couldn’t afford any more honey and wanted to knock out, sleep deeply, and become an Olympian again. But she just kept taking more Benadryl, and, based on what people are saying on r/hiveofdreams, all she probably saw were giant spiders and raccoons climbing up her walls and people jumping out of her windows, so the theory is that she kept taking the Benadryl so it would stop, and for all intents and purposes, it did.
After that controversy, the Hive of Dreams implements massive reforms. They start requiring people to sign waivers, and mandating mental health evaluations, the kind that people have to get before they buy a gun.
In the fall, Lamb starts eating less and hoarding boxes of pasta in the pantry like she’s preparing for a disaster. When Christopher asks about it, Lamb just laughs it off. “You never know.”
In the winter, Lamb turns away from Christopher and curls into Miah for warmth.
In the spring, Lamb brings all kinds of plants into her apartment. Every time she goes grocery shopping, she spends 15 dollars on orchids that become hearty and bright, almost giddy, under her care. She packs soil and the tiny pink umbrellas of mountain laurel that she stole from the park into a fishbowl. The pads of her fingers are green with plant matter. Aphids and tiny translucent spiders crawl over the counters, but it smells so good that Lamb is always smiling.
Through all of the seasons, Christopher appeases Lamb’s sweet tooth, a trait that they share. He makes marble pound cake, earl grey eclairs, homemade lemon and lavender lollipops, and honeycomb bread, Lamb’s favorite.
In late May, there’s an agitation. It’s inside Christopher and Miah and so it is also inside the air. Lamb has begun to notice it, too. She touches things and they stop trembling, stop humming, and she looks around at her world preparing to shatter.
Miah’s sick, but Christopher’s been expecting it. She always gets sick at the start of the summer. She drinks sprite, gargles salt water, and gives Christopher her soup orders: pastina topped with a hill of parmesan, hot and sour, ramen in a tomato broth. On Friday, Miah is still sick, so Christopher suggests they forgo using any Honey of Dreams this weekend and instead wait until she gets better. A few news outlets are predicting that the Hive of Dreams only has a few weeks left.
Miah says, “You know, we’ve known Lamb for about a year.”
Christopher smiles, but Miah doesn’t. “What I’m saying is: we need to be selfish with time.”
In the last dream, Miah is still sick, and Lamb is nothing if not observant. Miah lies on Lamb’s fig-colored couch that might have been a different color the last time she visited, unable to escape her fever even in this dream-world and watches a movie she’s watched a million times but can’t recall when she wakes up. While Christopher and Lamb make some kind of soup from a rotisserie chicken, Miah looks up to see them laughing and dewy over a steaming pot. The chicken is peeled in sections, revealing more and more bone and purple, its white meat dripping into the plastic bag it was sold in. Christopher squeezes some lemon into the soup and smears the leftover juice from his thumb across the corner of Lamb’s mouth, and for a moment, a pair of antennae flutter over Lamb’s head like pale silk when corn is rustled out of its husk.
The FDA has the Hive of Dreams shut down on June 9th, which a faction of people on r/hiveofdreams is celebrating. They flood the subreddit with think pieces about substance abuse and the psychology of realized desire and addiction. Miah bets that most of those reddit users don’t understand what it was like.
When Miah and Christopher go to bed, they don’t sleep. They just bite their nails and think. And for as loyal as Miah is, Christopher is much more so. He sits up halfway through the night and pulls out their budgeting notebook and starts to draw. Miah doesn’t need to watch for long to know that he’s trying to draw Lamb. He forgets to draw the freckles underneath her pink eyes, but he was never a good drawer to begin with. He starts a journal where he writes down everything he wants to tell Lamb, as if he could send her a postcard. It sits on their bedside table like a hot stove top.
Soon, the shock wears off and Christopher drives them to the botanical gardens every weekend. There are so many colors there, almost as many as in the dreams. Christopher and Miah become somewhat unhinged in the gardens, pinching crescent shapes into leaves, whispering words, praying. Christopher starts saying things that maybe Lamb would say, doing things that maybe she would, and Miah can’t look at him.
There are gaps in the conversation and cold spots in the room and colors crackle where the memory of Lamb flickers. There are no photographs of her, no scraps of her writing in checkbooks or calendars. When Miah and Christopher go to social events together and people ask them if they’re planning on having kids soon, Christopher wishes he could say, that’s a weird fucking question to ask. We're not, but we did have something else, if you’re interested in hearing about it. But all he can do is laugh, reach out, and grab Miah’s hand.
Miah’s birthday, among other things, is a big day for Christopher’s cooking account. Christopher usually spends two hours cooking and filming breakfast and dinner each, sometimes an hour or two the night before prepping. While Christopher cooks, Miah relaxes on the sofa, buys things with Christopher’s credit card, does her makeup, shaves her legs, chooses her outfit, and watches Christopher flit around the kitchen like a hummingbird.
On Miah’s birthday, Christopher has a brunch and dinner planned. Nobody is invited except the two of them, but that’s how things are now. It’s only ever just them.
They enjoy a brunch of arugula and strawberries cut into bunny shapes drizzled with poppyseed dressing, apple sausage, deviled eggs filled with pink yolk cream folding over itself, pomegranate seeds, and hard candy. The food makes Miah feel sparkly and then she notices the silence, the sound of Christopher saying something and her responding like two lost animals trying to find their way back to each other.
Over dinner, Miah’s esophagus squeezes hard around her food and she puts down her fork to drink the spicy cocktail that Christopher made for her and she cries.
“Miah, come on. It’s your birthday,” Christopher pleads.
The steaks on their plates sit in pools of their own still, bloody juices and she is numbed by the sense that everything in her life is familiar, that she has exhausted all of the discovery and newness accessible to her. Miah is struck with the need to flee their home and find somewhere tall to perch so she can look out over the world and know that there are things out there that are beautiful and unfathomable and also real.
“Miah,” Christopher says. He looks at the dinner he worked so hard on while Miah had filled her Amazon cart with lingerie and lounged on the couch wearing the lilac bralette and yoga pants that Christopher had bought her. There must have been a point Miah missed in her own mourning where Christopher gave up on the notion of filling the hole that Lamb left in their lives and returned to who he had always wanted to be: enough for her by himself. He sits in front of her, his plate half-eaten, her plate full, and it’s an agony that Miah has never seen before.
“Miah, I don't feel well,” Christopher says.
She tells him to go to bed, packs up their leftover dinner neatly into glass tupperware, makes Christopher a mug of steaming spearmint tea, and brings him an ibuprofen even though he doesn’t say anything hurts. In bed, she brushes his hair back, holds the only person she has now who is half-empty enough to receive her love, and resolves to do what she has always tried to do.
In one of the hives of dreams, there was a worker bee named Lamby. Really, all of the bees from her colony were named Lamby; at least, that’s what their pheromones were read as. The bees nursed a vast garden of nectarous lamb’s ear and, from that lamb’s ear, they produced the smoothest honey. In the garden, a stupid drone vied for Lamby’s womb. She made love, the sacred act, and the drone’s cold body pulled out and fell to the soil like a berry ready to be scavenged. When she laid her eggs, they were promptly removed by her sisters for treason to the queen. Lamby began to crave something stickier than a penile stylet going in and eggs coming out. She wanted to be the rain, the rhythm of which tempted the worms out of the ground. She wanted to be some hairy dead thing that vultures circled above, competed to devour, then tried to pick the scraps off from each other’s beaks. She had seen baby field mice nursing and foals weaving between their mother's legs, and she didn't know that to be daughterhood, but maybe she wanted to be that, too. Like how milk tells a story of strength and pain and sometimes loss, the honey in the hive of dreams always has a little bit of the bees’ dreams. The honey in Lamby’s gut dribbled out of her mouth and dehydrated to goop in a cool comb and inside there was a girl with eyes as pink as strawberry milk. When the gas flowed into the hive, the honey comb lifted out like some great bird awakened, and Lamby was so hungry. The honey comb was replaced by a jar of sugar water, flipped and draining into a plate of tiny pools, and the bees all gathered and put their lips to it like deer at a river to drink. With their dreams gone, the bees settled into work once more, making honey and feeding it with dreams they had already forgotten.
Hana Wisnuardi is a writer from Dallas, Texas pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas. Her creative work has been published in the tiny journal and Terrain.org.