Sand and Smoke

I was thirty-five years old and bored all the way down to my shoes. That was the summer I spent on Manda Island, playing three nights a week in a bar with sand on the floor, and spending my afternoons at the cemetery of abandoned beehives, where the crew let me sit at the sand animation table and sift fine grains for the artists who came over from the mainland. It was a job of sorts. It was mostly a habit.

The cemetery itself was a strange place, and I want to describe it right, because everything that happened later happened there. Rotting wooden hives lay toppled in the grass between old acacia trees. Moss had taken the boxes over. Nobody had kept bees in them for years, and the crew's job was to restore what could be restored, which mostly meant hauling out wet wood and repositioning frames that termites had turned into lace. I liked it. Even bored, I liked it.

That afternoon Julia was working the table beside me. She was twenty-eight, three years on the island, and she had hands like nobody I've ever met, quick and patient, scooping sand through the fine mesh in small deliberate motions. I watched my own fingers move over the grains and felt nothing. My fingers had been playing the same twelve songs for six years and now they apparently wanted to sift sand the same way every day too.

"You're doing that face again," Julia said, not looking up.

"What face?"

"The one where you're somewhere else." She tapped her scoop on the edge of the table. "Play something different tonight. You keep playing the same set and then you complain nobody dances."

She had a point. But the entire problem with points is that they're usually true and they don't fix anything. I told her I'd try, and she snorted, and I went back to pushing sand around for an artist's tide scene that was already better than anything I was going to contribute to it.

The fire was going nearby. Somebody on the crew had left a pan of fish oil too close to the coals earlier in the week and it had caught, and now there was this standing arrangement where the smoke just drifted through the hive rows all day, thick and white and sweetish, and nobody had the heart to fully put it out. It was supposed to calm any bees that had decided to move back in. Mostly it made the whole cemetery look like a dream about a cemetery.

That's when Sheryl came up out of the hive rows.

She was thirty-two, crew, the one who'd worked alongside me the longest, one whole season now, and she came through the smoke carrying a length of chain coiled over her shoulder with a zinc anode hanging off the end of it. It clicked against itself as she walked. She had a look on her face that I'd learned to be suspicious of, because Sheryl with a plan was a force of small chaos.

"Manny," she said. "I have a test for you."

"Is it a dangerous test?"

"It's a volunteer test, and it has nothing to do with the fish oil thing, which was partially your fault and which I have already forgiven." She set the chain down on the table and Julia raised an eyebrow at it and went back to her scooping, though I could tell she was listening. "I found something in the storage shed. Old stash, from the era when they actually worked these hives. You have to come see it."

"Can you describe it?"

"I could. But then you wouldn't come see it." She picked the chain back up. "Come on. Julia, you're in charge of the tide."

Julia waved us off with a scoop and didn't look up, and I followed Sheryl into the hive rows.

The smoke got thicker in there. White, slow, curling around the box lids. We went deeper than I usually bothered to go, past the restored hives to a back alcove where an old acacia had grown around one of the wooden boxes like it was trying to eat it. And there, hanging from a hook someone had driven into the trunk years ago, was a dress.

A beekeeper's dress. Full length, pale, that canvas fabric gone soft and gray with age, with long sleeves and a zip up the front and a wide-brimmed hat attached to a veil of fine black mesh. It hung there in the smoke like it was waiting for us.

"There's your test," Sheryl said. "Put it on."

I stood there and looked at it. I'll admit the thought crossed my mind in a way it hadn't crossed my mind before. I'd never worn anything like that. I'm a grown man of thirty-five, never married, nothing much in my history at all before twenty-one except guitars and bars, and I had never once put on a dress and thought about it twice. But there was no dread in it. It was more like curiosity with a pulse.

"This is your test? For me?"

"It's my test. It's for my own curiosity, honestly." She shrugged. "I found it, I thought of you, I don't know why. You have the right shoulders for it. Or the wrong ones. Depends how it goes."

"So if I put it on, what happens?"

"Nothing happens. Or something happens. That's why it's a test." She was grinning through the smoke. "You can say no. I want to say that plainly, you can absolutely say no and we go back to the table and never mention it again."

I looked at the dress. I looked at the smoke going through the hives. I thought about the twelve songs and the tide scene and the bone-deep boredom I'd been hauling around like the crew hauled wet wood, and I thought, well, why not, it's a Tuesday, nothing on the calendar.

"Fine," I said. "I'll try it on. Out of curiosity. Purely scientific."

"That's the spirit," Sheryl said.

She took the dress off the hook and held it open for me and I stepped out of my sandals and into it. The canvas was cool and impossibly light. It had that smell of old storage, dry wood and dust, and it fit better than it had any right to, wide in the body, generous in the sleeves, the hem coming down past my knees. I got my arms in the sleeves and Sheryl zipped me up the back, slow, and I felt every tooth of the zip as a small point of pressure through the thin cotton I had on underneath.

Then she lifted the hat and settled it on my head and arranged the veil, and her fingers brushed the back of my neck doing it, once, twice, maybe three times if I'm honest, and I'm not sure how many of those were necessary. The mesh turned the whole cemetery into a soft gray film. I could see her through it, out of focus, smiling.

"Well," she said. "Look at you."

"Do I look like a beekeeper?"

"You look like a beekeeper who's never seen a bee." She stepped back to take in the whole picture. "You look good. That's the finding of the test so far."

I laughed. I actually laughed, and it surprised me, because I hadn't laughed at anything on that island in weeks. Something about the veil, the smoke, the absurdity of standing in a dead hive cemetery dressed for work that died decades before I was born. It was funny. It was also, I noticed, a little bit thrilling, in a way I didn't have a word for yet.

Then the smoke thickened. The pan must have flared up again where the crew had left it, and a white billow rolled through the alcove and wrapped around us both, and the whole world went soft and gray and