Fire: finger-sized ghosts of it, appearing blue in the night, one at a time. Here. Then there, at the top of the bush's silhouette. Now, at the bottom. Again in the middle, over to the side. The tight blue flame would open like a hand into a full bloom of orange, crumple into nothing in the black, then appear again blue somewhere else, erupt as a writhing orange again, then vanish. All that would be left were tiny scattered pinpricks of a smoldering red in the darkness. These would survive only a moment longer, looking like tiny luminous insects slowly dying of anger. It was just beyond her own backyard, and it was the strangest thing she had ever seen in her whole nine years on earth; it was even stranger than what she'd seen on the bus ride to her first day at her new school: a space man standing in a field.

_____

We know sometimes even our quick two-day delivery isn't fast enough for you when you want a taste of Artisan Farms Ginger Bread. If you have access to fine rural wildflower honey, here's how you can make your own! We're so sure you'll love it so much you'll prefer our trouble-free way to get this delicious treat!

Artisanal Honey Ginger Bread

· One cup pure top-quality rural wildflower honey
· 1/8 teaspoon ground English cloves
· 1 1/2 teaspoons crystallized ginger
· 1/8 teaspoon ground canella cinnamon
· 1 3/4 cup dry ciabatta breadcrumbs
· 1 tablespoon fresh fennel seeds
· 1/4 teaspoon Madagascar vanilla extract

Over medium heat mix honey and all flavourings except fennel in a double boiler. Blend well with wooden spoon. Add breadcrumbs and mix well. Cover and cook for 15 minutes, until you have a thick, moist, solid mass. Turn out onto wax paper and mold into shapes. Sprinkle with fennel seeds. Let cool.

_____

Elephants didn't always look like they do today. Once upon a time, elephants had little snouts, not much bigger than a pig's. It was bigger, of course, because as most people usually notice immediately, elephants are larger than pigs.

Elephants were always smart and cooperative animals, admired even by other famously cooperative creatures like the bees who, back then, built their nests on the tips of tree branches or on flat open land. Then there came the great fire...

_____

"Katie I had the best--watch out, dumbass! I'm trying to--no sorry no not you Katie, I'm on the highway, and I had the best idea."

"Hold on. I'm at a stupid toll booth."

"Which one? 7-12 East? I just blew through there! You've gotta get Instatoll. I'm serious Katie, you just clip it to your visor and it debits you automatically with magnets or something."

"Huh? Hold on... Ok, what? You had the best idea? You mean Instatoll? Steph, you're cutting out. Sorry I'm so scattered, I'm just so busy."

"Oh, I know, you wouldn't believe how busy I am, Katie, not a second to breathe. Hey, you know that giant Phase Two sign behind the new house? They aren't gonna move it until the whole addition is filled in, so me and the kiddies are gonna plant a few nice big calico bushes under it, to cover up the posts, you know, it's legs?"

"A calico bush?"

"Katie they are gorgeous. It'll make that little ridge in backa the neighborhood look a lot nicer. I mean, it's not like I don't know I'm in the new Phase Two development. I don't need that sign to be the only scenery beyond the backyard fence, y'know? Anyway, that's probably legal, right?"

"Dunno Steph. It's not in your backyard? It's just something you and the kids are gonna do? You're not diggin' anything up, are you?"

"No. No. I already called and we're gettin' the Mexicans to plant a few big calico bushes and me and Ephram and Daphne are gonna go back there and watch'em. By the Phase Two sign. Or under it, kinda."

"...ok."

"I picked calico 'cause they're ok in shade and they start out a gorgeous purply pink and go white. The blooms do. Ordered'em at Central Planting."

"Oh, Central Planting! Gawd I love that store. So huge! I got my stone garden angels there."

"Those are precious, Katie."

"But it's so crowded. I love it but everybody goes there, if you know what I mean."

"Cutting out. Coverage way out here is awful. Hope they put up a tower or something. Lotsa room to do it, nothing but fields past Phase Two."

"I can't hear you. I'll call ya later. I'm really busy."

_____

I keep bees. It doesn't matter how clear I say it. I always have to repeat that one to people: I keep bees. Then the next thing they wanna talk about is the Nudsville fiasco where some disgruntled employee of that giant food company was rumored to have put arsenic in the honey. Some people who ate it got sick but it turned out to be unrelated. I don't have anything to say about it, since it didn't come to anything. I hate to admit, though, that I liked how the demand for my stuff became quite loud there for a while, and I was able to start asking for more for it. For a bit. But not generally. Not for much longer.

Overall, it's gotten harder. Not just because when I squat to lift and switch the hive box and the shallow super-case my knees crack like someone set off a pack of Black Cats in my slacks. Older I get the louder that crackin' is but that ain't what I'm talkin' about; it's gotten harder for everyone in agriculture, every kind. Death for full-blown farmers. And so come the encroaching rooves.

Growing up here forever, I always put off getting things I need because of the long trip into town. Even as it got closer I still somehow thought about it like that, but now I obviously have to change my mind because town is right here now. Not real town, mind you, but its thickening carapace: The Rooves.

Farm after farm has been eaten by The Rooves. Mr. Hadney once had crops that got into national aggie magazines, 'till he died. His kids mismanaged the place into rotting crops everywhere and chemical overburn and then blamed the estate tax and left. Then The Rooves came. Waves of them. Housing developments named after the country idyll they devour. Roof after roof spreading like sheep anthrax, black-gray and shingled. With those weird steep slopes, I guess required by law or some new common sense. You can stop payin' attention for a week and be shocked at the progress of'em. From a distance they are continuous, a single plated spread of adjoined peaks and slopes, spiking up and then slicing down across the countryside.

I understand, I guess, the allure of "country living." But I don't understand how it would matter that near your neighborhood, in the direction you never go, are a few failing farms and a broke beekeeper, especially if you can open your window and spit on your neighbor's house.

I fantasize someone will find oil or diamonds out here, and then big money will power The Rooves away, but then again underneath'em are just fat flat foundations, not fields, now. There's no recovering the land The Rooves ate.

I'm lucky my bees fly south to the wild flowers along Thanataw Creek, while The Rooves are rolling in from the North like a weird, slow, solid storm. If they'd come at me like this in, say, the sixties, I woulda put up a fight. Now I just hope, a little, and wait.

I'm less worried for me myself getting swallowed as I am my name. The name of the honey I sell to two "fine food" companies and a fancy mail-order catalogue is expensive because it's country. It's authentic. If it isn't country enough to sell my name anymore, like if a picture gets out, I'll have to sell to the big extracted-honey people and I won't make enough to keep my lights on. I don't keep enough hives, and I'm too old to expand.

I'd rather sit in the dark, though, on all this land, than be a kid cooped up in one of those instant-mansion boxes and chicken-pen backyards. That's asking for trouble. I'd be trouble, in that, young.

Matthew, my neighbor, is one of those guys whose glass is always half empty, while yours is always half full:

"You know," he says, "with so many folks livin' so close by you might pack some of your honey, jar and label it yourself, and sell it retail right on the spot. People love shit like that. Me? Ain't none of our new neighbors gonna come my way to buy a bushel of sorghum. You might just cut out the middleman," he says, or something to that effect. He makes it sound effortless: "Maybe set up a little stand, nothin' fancy, you wanna stay country. You could charge a lot more than you're asking wholesale." He tried to cloak a smile that made fun of my product's packaging, on down the line: "and you wouldn't have to tart it up with the shiny pink ribbons and gold paper and expensive little booklets."

He was referring to how Artisan Farms Honey in the catalogues went out with a box full of fluff about the local flowers and honey trivia or bee facts, or even a little pamphlet of foreign lore, such as the Thai fable about why bees live in hollow trees, with lots of Asian art and fancy lettering. I did chuckle, though, when I realized Matt must have ordered some. Nice guy.
_____

"Driver! Driver!! Slow down please, we want to collect some of these day-laborers. My mom needs a new deck!" Loud boy-laughs. A few girls.

The sixth-graders were noisy and raucous in the back as the bumpy bus-ride slowed to one of its stops out in the fields past Daphne's neighborhood.

The kids at her new school were mean, even though most of them were new, too. She tried to ignore them and look out the window at the fields. Beyond was a thick line of trees. Was that the edge of a forest? How far do the trees have to go back before it's a real forest? Could she walk into that forest? Things that seemed close when you were in a car or the bus were sometimes real far when you walk.

"Yes, driver! These! Go ahead, let them on!"

A loud squeak tore through the warm damp air inside the bus as the folding metal-and-glass door collapsed aside to allow in some brown girls in colorful shirts and skirts. They stamped aggressively, laughing, up the rubber steps onto the bus. The boys shut up. The girls smiled to the few they knew, looked at the crowded bus, then rolled their eyes like they'd done it a million times. Daphne's eyes returned to the field. There were strange white wooden boxes in the grass, lined up like little square houses with flat rooves.

Someone was squatting near one, lifting up its top half. She looked at the person, but couldn't see him. It was a spaceman. She couldn't believe it. She didn't know the girl next to her but she nudged her anyway, and pointed.

The girl stood and yelled "Check it out!"

"Hey! Hey!" An angry dad-voice. "Hey! Sit down!" The bus driver was ignored as most of the kids suddenly bunched themselves against the windows to look at the spaceman in the field.

"He has to wear that because he has AIDS," a boy said.

"He's a beekeeper, dipshit, that keeps him from getting stung."

A swat against the back of the AIDS-boy's head started a scuffle as the bus driver yelled "KNOCK IT OFF!" and slowed the bus down, like he was going to stop, sending everyone scrambling to their seats.

"Bees?" Daphne thought.

At school, coming in, everyone had to file through the front entrance and the library to the back hall where classrooms were.

The librarian's morning greeting was usually "Stop it!" and "Get away from there, go to where you need to be" to the kids who would drag their hands against various book spines and computer keyboards as they passed them.

Daphne approached her. The lady's face seemed made of several different parts instead of being one thing as a face. Daphne had poked her before realizing maybe she shouldn't have. She decided she'd just say it: "Do you have any bee books?"

"The letter B?"

"A book about bee guys, who have to wear stuff, outside, like a spaceman, so that...."

"Oh, sweetie!" The librarian said, and suddenly she had a nice mom-voice. "Yes indeedy-do we have some bee books! Did you see that on the way here this morning? The beekeeper?" She seemed terribly interested.

Daphne wondered if she'd be blamed for starting the fight over the bee man while the librarian said "Yeah sweetie, we'll get you a few bee books, right over here. C'mon!"

_____

Imagine you go to work and your, what is it--workspace--is covered in spray-painted swastikas and happy-faces.

If the fumes from that fucking paint, I thought, killed a queen, I am going to do something drastic. Seeing it, I realized something odd had happened over the years. I used to believe I had been thinking of my hives as crops, things I went out there to feed, maintain, harvest.

Seeing the neat white wood of my Langstroms sloppily strewn with nazi symbols and barely-centered happy faces made me realize I'd become part of the hive. It hurt. It wasn't just property, it was part of me. Fucking kids. That's what you get. That's what I get, for them cooping those kids up. How many little vicious malcontents are they breeding over there under the artificial light within The Rooves? At least none are tipped over, I thought, while a part of me wished they had done enough damage to cause them to swarm. That'd serve'em right.

I shouldn't say that, say stuff that promotes bee myths. Swarming isn't attacking. Swarming occurs when the hive gets too big and they prep new queens who then leave with a swarm of workers. After they settle into a new hive the queens fight to the death and the victor becomes the new hive's baby-machine. This is only associated with attack because the bees are exaggeratedly defensive in transit, and you don't tip over a hive that contains bees that are ready to swarm.

_____

Realizing how broad, tall, and loud the great fire was, all the animals panicked. Even the steady Elephants. "What will we do? The fire is getting closer! Where can we go?"

"We know where you can go to be safe," said the bees. No one knew geography as well as the bees. "But we'll never make it alone with all this smoke!" Bees hate smoke.

"Hide in our snouts!" Cried the elephants. "You can be safe from the smoke in there, and tell us where to go."

_____

"He keeps bees."

"That doesn't mean he's crazy. Are you there?"

"In this day and age? Who does that? Especially right by a residential district.'�

"Especially in a what? You're cutting out. Are you in your car? I'm almost home. Gawd, seems like I'm always saying that, but I'm never there!"

"A residential district. You know, with all those innocent people and kids and everything not knowing about a whole swarm of busy little--"

"Oh me too, really busy. Hey, he's prob'ly been doing that longer than anyone's been building neighborhoods way out there. Phase Two is fairly new, isn't it?"

"Fairly new? It's the newest."

"Oh. Right. You said that."

"Yeah, a lot of people think Country Collonades is newer but that's just because they left their signs up a lot longer. A long time after the addition was built."

"Ok. Yeah."

"A lot longer."

"Well he's probably harmless. I bet he feels crowded in there lately. I mean Phase Two went up so fast. Amazing how quick homes like that go up these days. I'm sure he's no threat."

"So you don't think I should call the police?"
"Huh?"

"I mean, some people are allergic, and it's fatal. Some kids are allergic. Do you think he should be--"

"UG! Signal. Can't... just call me when you get in. No wait. Tonight. I am so busy."

"Me too. I'll try to catch you later."

_____

Normally, I liked dealin' with the old guy, so this was hard, especially face-to-face:

"So, ya ornery old fart, what would you do if I told you I'm getting sued for peddling your honey 'cuz it made a buncha folks sick, 'cuz your honey is poison."

"P... p... poison?"

"Ok. Calm down. It ain't, exactly. We did all that spectrometer stuff on it. That shit ain't cheap, either. And you've been steady with us for a while so we ain't gonna charge you for all that, but your stuff is bad. Showing toxic. Can't use it."

"Huh? No, my stuff is pure, though."

"Yeah, pure and pricey, but after all that Nudsville business even the boutique stuff is bein' looked at closer. The beeshit tasteless stuff people get from the mega marts ain't showing anything toxic, I'll betcha that. You gotta think about that. Although they're probably drownin' it out with HFCS and God knows what else."

"But... toxic? How? What are you talking about?"

"Traces of toxins. That's all it is. Normally it'd be not so big a deal, but it seems your bees are gettin' shit from flowers that ain't cool for honeymakin'. Here, here's a list of plants, sorry those little pics aren't that great. Look around. See if you can do something about'em, if they're on your property, or, if they're not.... whatever."

"But I don't know.... They go south..."

"They're collecting somewhere new, apparently, and it's showing traces in your honey. Not enough to hurt anyone, but I look out for ya. We test. Dude, you need to clear that shit up. Throw out whatcha got. And find out what the hell your bees are gettin' after."

"Throw it all out? I can't do that!"

"Well we can test every bit of it, but the cost would be the same as pitchin' it. Look, it ain't high levels. But enough to show, and everyone's paranoid now. Someone could end up catching something that ain't got shit to do with honey, just bad luck, and test the product and then we've got a nice expensive new suit to settle. You want that? Look, check out that list and, here, here's an article about the plants. I circled the local ones. Look'em up in your bee mags. We're gonna have to test your next batch, too, y'know...."

"The next batch?"

I could imagine him seeing those field sentries, his nice clean white Langstrom hives, standing in mutiny against him after serving him so well for so many years. What a thing to happen, at his age, suddenly producing suspect product. It had to have taken a lot of work to get rid of the swastikas and happy faces. What a thing to discover, and now this. He looked like he wanted to vomit. He weakly took the lists like he knew he was beat. How could he know if any one, or two, or dozen of those plants were coming up in the tiny backyards of the McMansion neighborhoods?

"Are you sure it wasn't the vandals?"

It was hard to give him the "I'm sure" look. He's such a nice old guy. And to think I used to enjoy these visits a lot. Hell, I even used to enjoy the drive out there, but not anymore. "Look, between you and me, once everyone stops being so paranoid, we can get a little more lax about what plants your bees are visiting, but for now...."

He sighed. Poor old guy; that was tough.

______

The bees flew into the cool dark air of the elephants' wide blunt snouts, and from there guided the elephants to a clear broad lake, where they would be safe from the fire. The elephants waded into the cool water and watched the great fire's orange flames soar and listened to its crackling roar as it burned up everything around them. They could see the reflected face of the angry orange fire rippling across the lake water as they waited.
_____
"That's the cereal you asked for, Sugar, what do you want?"

"I saw fires last night, Mommy."

"What's that?"

"Oh, she's been saying that. She's just tryin' to get attention, makin' stuff up."

"Hush Ephram, and eat. Daphne, what are you talking about, fires?"

"Out there. By the sign. The bushes do fire at night in little bumps shaped like this."

"Um. Okayyy."

"We should go look."

"I can see'em from here, Sugar, and they aren't burned up."

"I don't mean all burned up like a big fire. I mean little fires, a bunch of little ones. Just like this big. And they go away. Can we go look?"

"Not this morning, Sugar, or you'll miss your bus. You too, Ephram. Your father's ready to take you to school."

_____

I was relieved to find no more bee corpses than usual. If they'd feasted on some potently toxic pollen there would be more dead bees at the floor of the hive than could be quickly handled by the undertakers.

In the division of labor within a hive, a group of bees does the regular duty of locating dead ones and passing them out through one of the bored entry holes, where other members of the mortician crew grab them and drop them outside the hive. There, they dry. Being lighter, the dead sun-dried bees are flown usually at least a hundred yards from the hive and dropped. This is also done with dead larvae and pupae while other bees clean out their cells. An accumulation of dead bees could attract scavengers or provide a place for dangerous bacteria to grow and infect the whole brood.

I'm glad the paint was all black and blue.

Bees will collect red paint. They don't just collect pollen, they'll also gather propolis, which is resinous stuff they get from tree buds. They use it to sorta laminate the inside of their hive and the hive openings, and to caulk holes and fill cracks. It has antibacterial qualities and makes for a slick surface that ants and such have a hard time climbing, and it makes a decent moisture barrier, too.

Unfortunately red paint has a synthetic polymer they like to use too, and I haven't heard that it's toxic or anything but I just hate the idea of it. Maybe it's just a matter of time, though, before they do this again with red paint and every color of the spectrum. As if The Rooves aren't an invasion enough. They emanate little guerrilla soldiers like kids and plants first, before they'll march over me with more Rooves. I'll be damned.

_____

As they overheard the elephants talk about the fire, the bees began to realize that they really liked where they were, inside the elephants' trunks. The coolness, the darkness, and the shape of the space were all perfect to them, and so they busily started building new hives in this nice new place. They decided as a group (as bees mysteriously do) that they were not going to leave.

_____

"There must be eight houses, besides ours that can see this at night. It is just so weird. Maybe someone saw something."

"I wanna get my money back from whoever ruined these plants. What kinda sicko does something like this? Daphne, when did you say you first saw it?"

"She saw it first? Well what an observant girl. And a cutie, too. Daphne, I'm Mr. Jenkins your neighbor. How old are you? Are you this many?"

"Tsk. I saw it after bedtime. I can't see my clock after that because I don't need a nightlight anymore. But I got up and turned on the light to look out but I couldn't see out anymore then, but I didn't check what time it was."

"Of course you don't need a nightlight, sweetie. She's very mature for her age. Maybe we should go door-to-door on this block and see if anyone saw anything."

"Might be a good idea. Gotta say, it's good to have neighbors who notice this kind of thing. And you planted these? I didn't even see ya do that, and I been looking at the dull back of this sign for almost a month now."

"Yes, I planted them. They're calico."

"Mommy the lawn guys came and--"

"Well I had them planted."

"Irregardless. We should ask around. After all, it's really weird. The beekeeper across the way there had some vandalism, too. And now this. The flower, it's, you know, the plant's reproductive organ."

"What?"

"See? This one. All burnt up, but you can still make out the stamen, which is--"

"Daphne go back inside!"

"Okayyy...."

_____

You know you aren't feeling right about your life when you see a little girl knock on your front door and you guiltily look around to see if anyone is seeing her do that.

I hadn't thought this way since Ellen passed fifteen years ago, but as I let her in I viewed my home anew and thought God, I'm a slob.

She was as nervous as I was, talking a lot about what I can't tell you, until she seemed to settle on the topic of bees. I think she was asking questions, but the weird guilt and paranoia and the slob-feeling and the need to clear a spot in the clutter for her to sit down meant I didn't answer a single one. I was too busy.

I sat down too, not in my usual spot, but in a new one so I could face her. I hadn't seen my front room from that point of view in years, which was weirdly familiar and strange at the same time. I was constrained with an odd discomfort. How do you do this? Some part of me had been arranging this polite encounter, seating her, myself, offering a soft drink, while I watched from a distance, then this smooth arranger abandoned me. I didn't know what to do or say, and it seemed like it would be rude, mean even, to ask what she wanted here.

"This is cool!" She said. "You live here?"

I didn't know what to say. She had to know I lived here. It meant something else.

"Wow!" Her eyes were big and hungry as she stood. "Are all these books about bees?'�

"Um, not all of'em. But, well, most of'em. Sorry, they don't have too many pictures."

I couldn't think of anything else to say, until I realized she needed me to be someone who can just say something to a question. She's just a kid. A curious kid from The Rooves. Maybe she was the one who saw.

"But, yeah. A lot of'em are about bees. Are you interested in bees? I guess you know I have a bunch of'em. I keep them for their honey, then I sell it."

"Do they like it?"

"Like the honey?"

"Do they like it when you take their honey? Or do they get mad and try to bite you?"

"Oh, they make much more than they need." I didn't want to explain the whole process, and realized that I'd been doing it so automatically for so long that stopping to talk about it was actually hard to do. "And they make it in a separate room from where they live and keep the babies." I didn't tell her that I sorta force them to do this.

She kept looking around, making me quietly list the things I needed to do to straighten up.

"Do bees ever catch fire?"

Now what could I do with this?

"Why do you ask that?"

She paused, picked her lip with her thumb and tiny forefinger, then said "Um. I don't know."

Wow. She was the one. "Does your mother know you're here?"

She grinned just like a little girl would. How do they learn that? When do they lose it?

"You should tell your mom when you leave the house. She might worry."

"I did tell her!" She was still grinning, trying to make it fade by distracting herself with the details of my messy front room, looking for another question to ask. "Who's that?" She pointed to a picture of Ellen, from her teen years before I met her, sitting astride a beautiful Palomino pony. "Is that your mommy?"

My mommy? "No. That's my wife, uh, was my wife. Anyway, your mommy, are you sure she knows where you are?"

"I told her." The guilty little girl grin remained. "But I think maybe she didn't hear me."

"Well you should make sure she always knows where you are, ok? Here, I've got something you can give her when you go back, in case she's mad." While I went into the kitchen she got up again to nose about amongst my old photographs, books, and mail-order boxes from various suppliers. In the pantry I found a sample jar; its fat neck was wound with a powder-pink ribbon, one end of which wormed itself through the punched hole in the corner of a beige cardstock booklet. The cover pictured a pair of bees and an elephant, rendered in simplistic ink brushwork, vaguely Asian. The jar and its golden-mud colored contents seemed a world away from the globs of sticky glue flooding the comb it came from.

"Wow! Thanks! My mom will love this! Did you make it?"

I had to laugh. "No. The bees did."

She laughed too.

_____

The elephants insisted the bees must leave their snouts, but the bees ignored them, busy working on new hives. The elephants blew and trumpeted mightily, sometimes shifting the new hives a bit, but could not expell the bees. The more established the bees became, the harder the elephants strained to blast the hives out, and the more they stretched their snouts. Soon their noses were quite long. They blew and blew. Their snouts got longer and longer, but the bees would not leave.

_____

My childhood memories of the county co-op are busy ones: other kids running around, climbing on the heavy equipment or looking at fishing lures and flies; older guys standing around talking about the weather, crops, interest rates; ladies trading seeds and sewing patterns from Simplicity or Butterick, fat packets stuffed with that thin translucent paper with strange marks on it. The whole place smelled of grain and fresh paint.

When I'd last paid a visit, things were different. Weeds had come up in the parking lot beyond the spaces closest to the aluminum building's front, which was a beaten span of flaked paint and a squeaky door. No one else was there but Rob who acted like he hadn't talked to anyone for a while.

"See here, whatcha wanna do is, you just take ya wunna these...." He demonstrated a tool that looked like a weed-cutter but instead of a whirling string or blades, it had a bullet-shaped head that burped a little plug of ignited propane. Fire.

"Shit. Shouldn't do this in here, I guess. See, poison can be just a whole messa trouble on down the line, so for smaller pest plants it's best just to, here, see? Just go round your property and toast'em. Best thing for dandelions. Here let's take it out back."

I remember thinking he should use it on his parking lot.

"See? Just pull this trigger here, then bring it...."

We watched a wad of clover tangle itself into charred curls, then fester in smoldering bits.

"Yep. Just burn'em where it counts, 'sall ya gotta do. Lookit, I'll make you a deal, since I heard how them fuckers from the new houses are actin', but it ain't as cheap as a weed-eater. Gotta get the propane, nothin' I can do about that."

"So... you know?"

He whispered, even though there wasn't a soul around for acres and acres. "Yeah. If you do it at night, ain't no reason to keep the flame on. See? Here. Just torch it up where ya need it and cut it on and off here, like this."

This little errand kept coming back to mind the whole time I was trying to figure out why that little girl came to my house. I was so distracted, I don't think I ever got her name.

_____

The elephants remembered what the bees had said during the great fire, and decided to find the most recently damaged forest. They inhaled as much smoke as they could from the smoldering remains, and held it in their snouts as long as they were able to take it. Bees hate smoke. They panicked.

_____

"Oh, God, Katie, guess what: you know what Artisan Farms is, right?"

"Steph? What who where?"

"Artisan Farms. You've ordered from them before, haven't you? You know, it's got all the hard-to-find food, like you can't get at the grocery. Finer ingredients. It's more expensive, but it's really worth it."

"Where is this?"

"Not where. Artisan Farms. The catalog. Surely you've ordered from there."

"Oh, uh, yeah. Sure. It's just been so long since I got stuff from catalogs instead of online. I'm surprised people still even do catalogs!"

"Oh, I know, but I still get tons of'em in the mail."

"So do I. Stacks. So what about'em? Steph? You there?"

"Oh, sorry, trying to merge. Running late. Real busy, but I just had to tell you. Artisan Farms sells this very exclusive honey from rural beekeepers that have bees that only use certain wildflowers."

"Does that make a difference? How do they make'em do that?"

"Oh, it makes all the difference! You have to try it! Anyway, the beekeeper who lives out past Phase Two? He's one of the producers! We can pick up Artisan Farms honey right behind the neighborhood without even having to order it. Fresh!"

"Really? That's neat."

"Oh, it's wonderful. He already gave us a sample, and it's heavenly. I could stuff myself fat as an elephant on this stuff. It's incredible. You should order some, or maybe I can pick you up a jar. You'll love it, and they make it right over on this edge of town. Isn't that great?"

"That's great. I gotta go, though, I'm really busy."

"Ok, I am too. Talk to you later."

_____

"Let us out!" The bees cried.

As soon as the elephants blew out the smoke, the bees went with it, flying into fresh air, relieved. The elephants spent much effort blowing out the hives, as well, lengthening their trunks even further.

_____

"Thanks for meeting me back here, Mr. Jenkins. I just found out another reason we need to do something about these plants. It's Mr. Hippolyte."

"No problem. Who's that?"

"That's the beekeeper. I mean, it's bad enough his hives got vandalized, but with someone torching flowers, that's just as bad, trying to starve his poor bees so they can't even make honey. I'm sure it was the same person, or people."

"So you wanna plant some more? These look like they're still doin' ok. They might bloom again, huh?"

"But we can't keep an eye on'em way out here. Look at this little flyer I printed up. I have a whole stack of'em and I was wondering if you'd help me distribute'em around the neighborhood."

"Nice job. Oh, I see what you're getting at."

"Yeah, and with the volume, Central Planting told me that they'd give residents of Phase Two a discount. That way, everyone can plant'em in their yards, where they can watch them, take care of them."

"That's true, and they sure are pretty."

"Those vandals won't be able to burn the flowers off of all of them if the neighborhood is full of calico bushes!"

"You know, that's a really nice idea. And a really nice thing to do."

"I just want to help. And it can be like our neighborhood flower, sort of like a mascot like a state bird or something!"

"The official Phase Two flower. What a great idea."

_____

The elephants didn't stay angry at the bees, because their new long trunks made drinking and eating so much easier. The bees had liked the cool dark hollow of the elephant trunks so much, they were determined to find a new place like that. This is why the bee now lives in a hollow tree, whose body is named after the elephant's snout.

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