BEES IN THE CISTERN

The humming began inside the mortar, too low to wake Luzia. Antônio tilted the wood and saw three small bees climbing up through the crack, covered in flour up to their wings. Others came out afterwards, eleven according to the girl, who had woken and was counting lying down, adding two whenever he got near the end. There are nine, Antônio said. Eleven stay longer. He moved the bowl away from the hearth. The dough had already formed an opaque skin, and the fifth portion remained under the clay lid. Ilva opened the window to let the bees through. They ignored the light, landed on the damp rim of the dough and began removing grains, one by one. The man laughed by the partition. It was a short sound, rusted from disuse. Antônio tried to blow them away. The swarm answered by coming out of the crack in numbers enough to cover the bottom of the mortar. Luzia corrected the count to thirty-seven. Nobody corrected Luzia. Before the pit, Nael kept that mortar in the bar's storeroom, where the bees came in through the roof tiles and made their home in the football boots. Antônio remembered the honey running across the floor after the matches, mixed with the red earth from their heels. Now the ground was a strip compacted by mining vehicles, the grass ended several metres before the wall and the trees flowered for fewer days. The bees had come down to the kitchen after the moisture trapped in the wood. One of them dived into the dough. Another went under the lid. Antônio lifted the clay and found five on the reserved portion. He took the pot out to the porch, but the swarm followed the smell of the maize. Ilva brought the mat. The man dragged the grey box with his good leg to clear the way, and the four of them remade the meal under the murici, away from the rotor that cooled the technical load while the heat pressed their clothes against their bodies. The bees kept arriving. Luzia offered a scraping of dough on a leaf. They covered the maize and rose together, heavy. They flew to the empty cistern, went in through the gap in the lid and vanished into the dark. They're going to make porridge down there, she said. With water from what, the man asked. From counting wrong. Antônio laughed without meaning to. He divided the invaded portion into smaller pieces and left one of them near the gap. The rest went back into the pot. They ate with their fingers, because the spoon remained forgotten on the counter. The dough tasted of smoke and husk. Luzia chewed slowly to make the shade last. When they had finished, Antônio asked for the data collector. Ilva stayed seated. The request for the two remaining trials had been available for less than forty minutes, and his authentication alone would be enough to oblige her to hand over or delete the files. He watched the bees going into the cistern with crumbs taken from the food. I want the third, he said. Just to listen, she asked. I want to request it. Then I'll decide. She did not fetch the device. Her bandaged hand stayed on her knee. Antônio set aside the last piece of dough for her, smaller than the others, and repeated the request. Ilva took the portion and held it between her fingers. A bee came out of the cistern without flour and landed on Ilva's bandage. She waited for it to fly off. Then she went into the house and opened it at low volume. The mortar stayed on the porch. Inside the crack, the swarm was laying down new wax, making useless the wood that still held Nael's maize. Antônio watched the movement and put off listening until night. When the sun drew back, there was a line of bees between the dry cistern and the kitchen, and nobody knew which of the two they would choose to occupy.