The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. by Lee Kravetz

Author:Lee Kravetz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

DECEMBER 28—

A new thought: perhaps loss itself is a kind of intervention, a way to confront the fact we hold no power over much in life except over how we respond to powerlessness.

Wrapped in a coat, scarf, and wool hat, alone I trundled across the snow-covered grounds this evening. From a distance, the stone shack on the path beyond the small farm looked like nothing more than a pile of rocks, or a small mountain rising from the bluish ice.

The Norseman stooped through the hut’s doorway and came out into the cold hauling two tin cans of gasoline.

“You’re sure you want to see this, Doc?” he asked.

I did, I said, bracing against the wind. I needed to stand witness for the women of Codman Manor.

For a long moment the Norseman faced the dozen pine stacks. There was no sign of activity from the bees, all tucked away, hidden from the winter. The evidence of their bristling capability, their full killing might, was as masked as any pain the Norseman might have felt by the task at hand.

He unscrewed the cap of the first tin. Approaching the stack closest to him, he splashed gasoline across the top.

I put a glove to my nose, the smell of fuel instant.

The Norseman moved on to the next stack, delivering the gasoline as though watering rosebushes.

Within the boxes, the insects were alerted to danger. Scouts lifted off and began to hover around the drawers. Against the relief of the snowfall, the bees looked like confused snowflakes refusing the draw of gravity.

The Norseman emptied the first tin and moved on to the second, swinging gasoline across the last of the stacks. When he was finished, he pressed the canister into the snowbank and reached into his coat for lengths of burlap. With a flick of his butane lighter, he ignited the fibers. The flame cast his jaw, nose, and forehead in a brass-colored glow.

One by one, he tossed the igniters. Stacks went up in flames. There rose a furious tap, tap, tapping from within the boxes like rain hitting a log roof. Mud-colored smoke mixed with the night. Instead of insects and snowfall, embers spun in the air. I backed away from the heat of twelve pyres.

Behind me at the mansion, the women of Codman Manor, pulled from their once-immutable evening routines, watched from the windows as flames rose and twisted in the purpling sky.

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