LatinosUSA

It was a story about the bee that stung his daughter

and he told it from the point of view of a hive

in a yard in a small midwestern town. And a small

midwestern periodical published it in the same

issue as it published the work of a Chinese poet.

He admired the Chinese typography alongside

the English translation and he tried to determine

which characters corresponded to which English

words butnever got farther than an educated

guess for“I” and “tree.” He imagined the Chinese

poet sending copies to friends and family half-

way around the world. He imagined someone

translating his story and someone using it to

try to learn English. He thought about different

kinds of readers responding to its being told

from the bee’s point of view, something he’d

worried about even as he wrote the story. What if

the color of the flowers on the dress she was

wearing seemed inappropriate and the parallels

between the morals of the town and the business

of the hive raised more questions than they

answered: Were people driven only by instinct?

Would readers think he wanted them to see

bees as behaving with humanlike intelligence?

What if the bee was a murder hornet and his

daughter was allergic and went into shock:

Would they wonder why he didn’t say she died?