Bee Taken [FICTOID]

As beehives go it looked quite unusual, more like a giant club jutting up into the sky than a box with a lid. 

Rising 10 feet above the ground on a thin metal pipe, the beehive towered above the flat field.

Xudi Amin like visiting the beehive.  The field of flowers surrounding it to provide pollen for the bees, smelled delightful, and as long as he made no threatening moves the bees ignored him. 

The field was a good place to work on his poetry.  Xudi was a poet of no mean ability but lay hampered with a monomaniacal obsession over the singer Kate Bush. 

His friends would chide him for his fascination with her.  “She is from the UK,” they said.  “You live in Kenya, why not honor Kenyan musicians with your poetry? At the very least some African musician like Fela Kuti or King Sunny Ade.”

“They're good,” Xudi would reply, “Better than good, excellent. 

“But they don't speak to my heart the way Kate Bush does.”

“The lad has pale fever,” his friends joked, making him in burn with shame.  He felt no sexual attraction to Kate Bush, indeed if anything he was asexual. 

Rather her music spoke to him and as opposed to her physicality, attracted and inspired him.  That is why he sought the solitude of the field of flowers around the beehive. 

The beehive stood on a tall metal pipe for a logical, innovative reason. 

Rather than lift the lid as beekeepers did with regular beehives to remove the frames holding the honeycombs, this beehive let honey flow down the pipe to a faucet that could be tapped.

Xudi Amin liked to stay in the shadow of the beehive as the day progressed.  In the mornings he'd move closer and closer as the sun rose overhead. 

He first heard Kate Bush in his official capacity as an archivist at Kenyatta University.  While processing a number of music recordings from around the world, he listened to Bush’s album Hounds Of Love.  Something about her lyrics and ethereal voice spoke to him the way no other musician did. 

Why should I feel ashamed about that? Xudi wondered.  He understood fully the resentment most Africans felt toward European colonialism and other than his affinity for Kate Bush felt no attraction to the West.  If the art speaks to one, why should one worry about it about where it came from?  If it answers a question in your heart, if it fill fills a gulf in your soul why not embrace it and celebrate it? 

As he lay on his back in the shadow of the beehive, oxidation finally worked its magic on the thin metal pole the beehive rested on.  A small imperfection, a tiny weld where the faucet connected to the pipe allowed an invisible seem of rust to flourish and now this defect reached the breaking point. 

Xudi Amin never knew what hit him.  One moment he was laying on his back, enjoying the warm summer breeze, the next he was wherever poets go when a heavy club-like beehive comes crashing down on them.

In one sense it was the perfect ending for Xudi Amin, surrounded by fragrant flowers, pulverized and mixed with a metric ton of honey while thinking blissful thoughts of Kate Bush and her music. 

What sweeter way is there to go?

© Buzz Dixon