It was almost night when I saw him out there. He wasn’t really doing anything except standing in a field behind our house and looking kind of lost under that sky the color of iced plums. He seemed to be about my age, which was the back half of ten, so I figured I would go out there and tell him he was free to do nothing but should kindly exercise that freedom elsewhere. And since this stranger didn’t know me from any other lonely asshole in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, I decided I would yell at him in the voice of my father, who could have struck fear into the ocean when he said, “You better take that bullshit somewhere else!”
I snuck out of the house and came up on the field. The grass was wet from the day’s rain, the cicadas about splitting my head in half with their resurrection blues. I approached, and the boy did not notice. When I got close enough, I saw he was doing something other than nothing. He was waving his right hand in the air above his head. If his feet had been moving, you would have said he was dancing. But his feet were still. Everything on him, except for the one hand, was perfectly still. I don’t know another way to say it—this boy was writing words on the air itself.
I thought about how his face would look when I shoved him hard in the back and said, “You better take that bullshit somewhere else!” I couldn’t execute this vision, though. I might be my father’s echo, but I’m still my own kind of watcher. And here was a thing to watch.
I followed the fingers of his right hand, tracing the contours of that invisible script. I figured if I studied him long enough I could decipher some part of his message. My vision being twenty-twenty, this should have been easy. Except it wasn’t. His hand moved quickly, and judging from the continuous loops, he was writing in cursive, which was something my school refused to teach. I watched him anyway. Bullshit or not, I wanted to know what kind of story was so necessary that you had to stand in the middle of a field on a summer night and compose it behind a stranger’s house. I watched until this question burned inside me like a tiny fire, at which point I approached him. I flattened my palm and started to shove him. I said, “You better—”
I stopped when I saw what he was doing. He was not writing words onto the air. He was holding on to a piece of thread that had been fixed as a leash around the belly of a bee. The bee flew around and the boy’s hand moved with it. I watched the bee cut loops against the darkened sky and felt like a foolish child for ever having dreamt up that other business.
“What’d you say?” he asked me, not taking his eyes off the bee.
“Nothing,” I said. “I didn’t say nothing.”
It was at that moment that our porch light, which burned like two suns nailed to the side of a shitty house, switched on, stranding the two of us and half the field on a minor island of white-hot light.
I looked at his face, newly lit, and experienced a second disappointment—the realization that he was not even a stranger. He was just a kid from my school, a quiet country nobody like me, and the reason I had not recognized him was that he had buzzed off all of his hair. I was sorry then for ever having left my house, and, even though I would never share this story with my father, I thought about what he would say if I told him that, for a moment, I had believed that a stranger could appear out of nowhere to write some great secret on the air.
Then another little fire of a question kicked up inside of me. That and the Carolinian need to make polite conversation. I nodded at the bee on the string.
“How’d you do that?” I asked him.
“I caught him in a jar,” he said. “Then I put the jar in the ice box.”
“The cold doesn’t kill him?”
“Nope,” he said. “Just slows him down some. Makes it so he can’t move when you tie the string. Then you bring him back outside and—poof!—he flies around good as new.”
“What’s the point, though? To hold on until he dies?”
“Not usually,” he said. “Usually I cut them loose when there’s nothing left to see.”
“And then what?”
This was the first and only time he took his eyes off the bee and looked me directly in my face, and when he did, he seemed to resent me for having asked such a question. The new haircut gave him a hardened, mean-spirited look, and I thought for a moment that he was going to hit me. Sometimes the whole world, not just my father, seemed forever on the verge of punching in someone’s teeth for the crime of curiosity.
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“I’m talking about after there’s nothing left to see,” I said. “What comes after that?”
For a moment he seemed to consider my question, and I stood there beside him, mesmerized by the flight of the bee on the string. The bee was no longer ducking around in the air. It was pushing itself upward, to the extent that the line had gone taut in the boy’s hand, and it seemed as if, with the help of just one good lunge, the bee could slip loose from its tether and fly free.
I was secretly hoping this would happen, but in watching the bee so closely, I must have stared into the porch lights because suddenly my eyes were fogged over with bright pink splotches, and everything around me—the boy, the bee, the field—surrendered its clear form to this new cloud of throbbing color. I rubbed my eyes and fixed nothing. The splotches grew larger, and they burned brighter, and after a few seconds, my vision was gone. In its place: a pink so incandescent it hurt my head. If the world was still there, it was a secret now, something free to move beneath the fog without fear of being seen.
“Answer me,” I repeated. “What comes after?”
I waited, but the boy never addressed me. Instead, as I stood there and continued to rub my eyes, he handed me the string, thrusting it into my palm the way that a child who is no longer hungry sloughs off a piece of unwanted food. Then he walked away without saying another word. I tried to watch him, but I was still mostly blind. Judging from the sound of his footsteps, he walked into the woods.
I stayed where I was, holding the string in one hand and attending to my eyes with the other. The pink cloud was still thick, but it was no longer complete. After much blinking, I had carved out a small window in the upper left corner of my eye. It was through this window that I tried and failed to watch the bee, who was back to carving out shapes in the night air. If he was writing something, I could know it, but I would never be able to see it. Which is why, in the end, I gave up and closed my eyes.
I heard the door to the house creak open and slam shut.
“What the hell are you doing out there?” came my father’s voice.
When I said nothing, he repeated himself, a little louder, a little meaner. But I had no intention of answering. The bee moved and my hand moved with it. I didn’t need to see where it was going to know what it was saying. It moved with the certainty of a saint. It wrote, Burn. Burn. Burn. 
Dan Leach has published work in The New Orleans Review, Copper Nickel, and The Sun, and written two books of short fiction: Floods and Fires (University of North Georgia Press, 2017) and Dead Mediums (Trident Press, 2022). He is the 2023 recipient of Texas Review Press’s Southern Poetry Breakthrough Award, and his debut poetry collection, Stray Latitudes, will be released in 2024.
Illustration: Andrew Blanchard