Hum

Abstract

Hum Abigail Beckel (bio) A woman lived in a farmhouse alone,her husband dead six months now. She heard the house talking to her—it sighed and creaked and hummed. She felt the wood floors grow heavy.They sounded different to her when she paced across them—thick and dense—or maybe her feet had become lead instead of patter.The humming nearly drowned her in the night, her fractured dreamsall crop dusters and engines. She wondered if madness had a sound,or if it was possible her eardrums had burst from exposure to too muchsilence. But then one day in the basement her eyes went too—she stared at the ceilingwhere dark shapes bloomed and grew. While she watched, one form morphedinto a teapot, a balloon, the head of a wolf, before it suddenly started to drip,one drop at a time, from exactly where the wolf’s eye would be. She knelton the floor and cried, afraid of herself. [End Page 88] Looking up at last, she saw the wolf headstill wept. She picked up a hammer and drove the claw end into the wetdarkness of the animal’s face and pulled. The ceiling came away with more easethan she’d expected, and as it stripped back, liquid poured out, dousing her like a bucketof water, her head drenched, her eyes and mouth forced shut. And around her,hundreds of small whirring voices rising. There was the stickiness, the sweetness,the tumult of wings, the furious buzz— she rubbed honey from her lashesand looked up into the jagged hole where a heaving honeycomb spannedthe room, lodged between floorboards. The bees crowded against her skinsoaked in their labors, cloaking her face and clothes in movement.A few stung her, pricks hot as ember, but she did not fight them off, the massof beings, their constant flutter touch— she was part of them now, an engine,their joined bodies humming into flight. [End Page 89] Abigail Beckel ABIGAIL BECKEL is a poet and the publisher of Rose Metal Press, an independent, nonprofit publishing house for books in hybrid genres that she co-founded in 2006. Her poems are featured in Delaware Poetry Review, RHINO, Open Letters Monthly, and the Fourth River, among other publications. She lives in Takoma Park, Maryland.* Copyright © 2016 University of North Carolina Wilmington