The Beekeeper's Daughter

The doctor who admitted me didn't believe in ghosts. He believed in delusions, in misfiring synapses, in the chemical architecture of madness. Not in the pale women who walk through bedroom walls at 3 a.m., trailing grave-moss and whispers.

"Auditory and visual hallucinations," he wrote in my file. "Paranoid ideation."

He didn't ask about the bees.

My father kept hives behind our house, white boxes stacked like miniature mausoleums. After he hanged himself from the apple tree, the colonies collapsed one by one. But the bees didn't die—they migrated, seeking a new home. They chose me.

First in dreams: my mouth filling with honey, my lungs with wings. Then while waking: a constant buzzing beneath my skin, as if my bones had become hollow and resonant. Finally, with purpose: they built their hive inside my chest cavity, just behind my sternum. I could feel their precise engineering, the perfect hexagons of comb stretching from clavicle to diaphragm.

The hospital walls are the color of institutional despair—a shade between moth-wing and abandoned hope. At night, they breathe. I've timed the intervals: inhale (seven seconds), hold (three seconds), exhale (ten seconds). The rhythm of something ancient learning to pass for human.

"You're experiencing anthropomorphism," Dr. Keller explains during our Tuesday session. "Projecting life onto inanimate objects."

But I've seen his eyes flicker to the walls when they exhale.

I don't tell him about the queen who whispers to me while the Thorazine dissolves under my tongue. I pretend to swallow, but hide the medication in the secret space between cheek and gum. Later, I'll press the half-dissolved tablets into the mortar between bathroom tiles, building my own honeycomb of chemical secrets.

The queen has my father's voice but a woman's knowing. "The living are the real ghosts," she says, her words vibrating through my ribcage. "Walking around believing they're solid when they're mostly space—atoms pretending to touch but never truly connecting."

In group therapy, we discuss coping mechanisms. Ruth cuts herself to "let the darkness out." Michael hasn't slept in six days because "they come for you through dreams." Hannah sees her dead twin in every reflective surface.

I don't mention the bees, or how I'm certain we're all experiencing the same thing from different angles—the world's thin veneer peeling back to reveal what writhes beneath.

At night, the pale women visit one by one. They perch on the edge of my bed, corpse-cold and curious. They've been watching humanity since before we crawled from the oceans. They find us interesting but ultimately disappointing—so much potential, so little vision. One trails her fingers through my hair, leaving frost patterns on my scalp. Another presses her mouth to my ear, sharing secrets in a language that tastes like copper and electricity.

"You're special," they whisper, their voices synchronized to the buzzing in my chest. "You've been chosen."

I know this is textbook psychosis. I've read the DSM-V sections on schizophrenia, on dissociative disorders, on the mind fracturing under pressures it can't bear. I understand the neurochemical basis for hallucination, for paranoia, for the sensation of insects beneath the skin. I know my father's suicide triggered this breakdown.

What I don't know is why the bees are building something inside me. Why they vibrate in warning whenever Dr. Keller approaches with his paper cups of oblivion. Why the pale women have started bringing me gifts—small bones, perfect spirals of hair, teeth so ancient the enamel has turned translucent.

"You're making progress," Dr. Keller tells me in our Friday session. "The new medication seems to be helping."

I nod, docile as a domesticated animal. The queen stirs behind my sternum, annoyed. The walls hold their breath, waiting.

That night, I dream my father climbs down from his apple tree, neck still bent at its impossible angle. He opens his mouth and bees pour out, carrying scraps of his final thoughts on their wings.

"It's time," he says, voice thick with honey and decay.

I wake to find the pale women gathered around my bed, more than ever before. They've brought a final gift: a crown woven from bee wings and cobwebs, hospital bracelet plastic and dried flowers. One places it on my head, her touch gentle as winter light through stained glass.

"The hive is complete," they whisper in unison.

I feel it then—the fullness in my chest, the weight of something finished, perfected. The bees have built their new home, cell by meticulous cell. Not honey this time, but something darker, sweeter, more potent. A new kind of colony.

In the morning, the nurse finds my bed empty except for a perfect honeycomb in the shape of a human heart. The walls exhale one last time. The hospital records will call it an escape, then a suicide when they don't find my body.

They won't think to look for me in my father's abandoned hives, now pulsing with renewed life. They won't recognize me in the pale figure who walks the grounds at night, trailing moss and whispers. They won't understand that I've become the new queen, my subjects buzzing between worlds, building bridges between what is and what waits just beyond perception.

After all, Dr. Keller doesn't believe in ghosts. He believes in delusions, in misfiring synapses, in the chemical architecture of madness.

He still doesn't ask about the bees.

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Dana Wall traded balance sheets for prose sheets after years of keeping Hollywood's agents and lawyers in perfect order. Armed with a Psychology degree that finally proved useful when creating complex characters and an MBA/CPA that helps her track plot points with spreadsheet precision, she ventured into the haunted halls of Goddard College's MFA program. Her work, which has appeared or will appear in Intrepidus Ink, 96th of October, Fabula Argentea, Summerset, 34 Orchard, Eunoia Review, The Shore Poetry, Dreams and Nightmares Bright Flash Literary Review, and Sykroniciti, confirms that words are more reliable than numbers, though occasionally harder to balance.