Tell the Bees - Robin, Hamish

It shouldn’t be so sunny.
Angus knows that the sun doesn’t stop shining, the birds don’t stop singing, and flowers don’t stop blooming because death happens. 
But it still feels like the world should mourn at least a little for someone who mourned every loss she saw in it. The herb garden is full of tiny stick-and-stone grave markers for every hummingbird, bumblebee, and butterfly his mother had ever found lying cold and dead in their paths. The stump of the tree that a lightning strike felled stands ahead of him, carved into the intricate shape of a barely-opened lily. 
And the reason there’s another grave, a bigger, deeper, more elaborately memorialized one, is that Eleanor Robinson had never gotten over the loss of her husband.
Angus thinks that the least the world could do is make a permanent little cloud like the one she carried with her for so many months. 
He follows Grandda through the grass, knee-high on him, to the set of softly-buzzing wooden boxes in the meadow behind the house. 
The two of them don’t bother with smoke as they knock on the sides of the boxes with the tips of their fingers. A golden cloud surrounds them, the sound sinking into Angus’s bones and the feeling of tiny feet on his arms and cheeks more grounding than frightening. 
His grandfather’s voice is a rumble as deep and earthy as the hum of the hives themselves. 
“Tha i air falbh.”
“She is gone.” 
The humming changes a note, from the cheerful chatter of a happy, working hive to a subdued whispering sound, like the change from rain on the roof to the rasp of branches against a window. There’s something haunting in it now.
Angus shivers as that sound, too, seeps into his bones, runs through his veins, and draws prickling tears, unbidden, into his eyes.
Grandda is singing now, under his breath. The notes seem jarring, discordant, and shaky. Angus has never heard the song before, but some part of him still knows it. He lets it call out to the places inside him that are as raw and broken as its melody, and joins in, first a whisper, then a hum, then something like a sob. 
The bees lift from his arms and face, clustering over the hives, bodies rising and falling in a shifting mass. He’s never seen them act like this before. 
His mother had refused to tell them Dad was dead. 
Refused to believe it.
Refused to mourn him and move on and live again.
Grandda had said it simply, when he threw the first handful of earth into her grave.
“It was never the grief that killed her. It was the hope.”
Grandda’s hands fall on Angus’s shoulders, and he wipes his tears away with both hands before turning to look up at him.
“This is the way it should be,” Grandda says. “They will carry our sorrow into the skies.”
The dark golden cloud of bees rises into the air, swirling and churning like a storm. 
Their shadow falls across the hives, across the meadow, across Grandda and Angus standing and watching them rise.
All he needed to do was wait.
There was always going to be a cloud for his mother.