By Allison Zhang

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In the town where rain forgot to stop, she kept bees in her mouth. Real ones—wings behind molars, tiny furred bodies tucked behind her teeth. A buzzing of warning or blessing; in weather like ours, it was hard to tell the difference.

No one asked how it began. You don’t ask why someone carries grief. Or a hive. Some stories bruise when touched.

She rarely spoke. When she did, her voice came slow and thick, like honey poured over a wound—that reluctant sweetness, that shimmer before the sting. Sometimes a dazed bee would crawl out, blinking and bewildered, and she’d tuck it back in with the tenderness of someone returning a child to sleep.

People tested her, because people are foolish with mystery. A stone at her doorstep. A prayer uttered too loudly. Superstition masquerading as courage, which was boredom thinking it deserved revelation.

Then she vanished.

Three days later she returned, her scarf tied to the church door like apology or threat—undecided. After that, the waiting began. We pretended we weren’t waiting, which of course meant we were.

But for what? A swarm? A reckoning? Something terrible and holy?

She only said one thing: Soon. Soon like prophecy. Soon like the moment before the needle touches the nerve and the dentist lies kindly to your face and you pay for it anyway.

We brought peaches, as if fruit could ease fate. We practiced being chosen, or spared—which can be the same thing, depending on who’s telling the story. No one said it aloud, but we had already decided our roles: witness, sacrifice, disciple, coward, believer. Myth makes volunteers out of cowards and cowards out of believers.

Some evenings she stood by the lake with her head tilted back, scarf loose, mouth parted as though listening for instructions. Rain diminished around her like respect. The bees crawled inside her, and everyone in town seemed to hear the same secret in the same moment, though none of us could name it.

Children watched her from windows, learning early that some women carry fire, some carry water, and some carry things with wings.

Once, a boy hurled pepper across her porch, and once, a man muttered a blessing sharp enough to cut his own tongue. A week later, the boy’s lips bloomed with welts and honey; the man walked around with his voice cracked open like a nest. We pretended we didn’t notice.

Sometimes she let them out in daylight—bees rising from her mouth in a slow spiral, like a thought building its courage. We held our breath as they hovered, then scattered, then returned again, every last one.

One little boy swore he saw flowers inside her mouth, whole blossoms opening on her tongue while the bees fed. We shushed him—you cannot hand children that kind of truth too early—but privately, we believed him.

And the strange things kept happening: the frost that melted overnight, the tomatoes ripening too soon, the dog that crawled into her yard broken and walked out healed. Old men stopped wheezing. The sky changed texture around her.

Soon, she said again, and her voice—thick, humming—felt like weather deciding something enormous.

We didn’t ask what she meant. We just waited.

Some nights we dreamed of her mouth opening and the bees pouring out without end, filling houses, sweeping through bedrooms, covering our faces like a blessing or a burial. In the dream, none of us ran. We stood still, letting wings brush our eyelids.

When we woke, our tongues tingled, and the air in our throats felt crowded—as if something winged and patient had curled up there, waiting for its cue.

Soon, she said.

And we believed her.

We are already humming, even if we pretend not to hear it. Even if our teeth feel a little too full. Even if our mouths are learning something that hasn’t yet asked to be spoken.

When she opens her mouth all the way—and we know she will—we won’t run. We’ll hold still like obedient creatures, or willing ones, and let whatever comes decide who we are.

After all, there are worse fates than honey and wings. Worse fates than being chosen. Worse fates than becoming the thing you feared because it was already inside you.

Soon, she promised. And if we’re lucky—or unlucky— or both—we’ll be ready when it happens.

We’ve been practicing our hums.