The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray

Feeling like it doesn’t matter whether you sit or stand Come or go Live or die It will all disappear in the silence a tiny speck of white on white Bouncing off the walls like an echo of yourself

Komorebi is the Japanese word for the kind of light you see in a forest.

He thinks again how being up above it all the time, you never really get a feel for how much ground there is in the ground, how much earth there is to the earth, what it takes for us to have something to walk on.

And when you leave the bar she takes your hand and you run together across the moonlit square, spiriting over the cobblestones like nymphs, ethereal and beautiful. In your journal later you write noctilucent gibbous and The She which is or are the fairy creatures that haunt the land according to Aunt Rose but the name makes them sound like some magical omnipresent Girl and you can feel her around you, her moonshine skin and her dark night-starred body.

Leave the rights and the wrongs out of it Tell them what it’s like to be held again to be desired How you feel his wanting you like an electric charge That it lights everything up like a house that has lain empty and now is all ablaze But how afterwards it’s worse than before because now the darkness knows it is darkness the emptiness knows it’s emptiness the poor house knows there’s nobody home