Free The Sound of Language by Amulya Malladi

white snowdrops, vintergoekker , and the bright yellow erantis— that they would be getting ready to swarm. Anna had supersonic ears and she could hear the bees as they got ready to leave the colony and find a new home. Anna was their swarm radar and she and Gunnar had always managed to avoid swarming by adding more boxes in time.
    But this year he had been sitting on his ass doing nothing. It was the end of April. If swarming had begun he hadn't heard it, though he hadn't been out enough to hear any bee activity. Before the bees swarmed, scout bees would start looking for a place for the colony to move. And if he had been watching his colonies he would have seen the bees starting to make a new queen so the colony could split in two.
    A pang went through him: what Anna would think of him ignoring the bees? She would be disappointed.
    “See a honeybees todays?” Raihana asked again because he hadn't really answered, just nodding vaguely while he looked around the garage. Gunnar realized she was trying to get through to him, trying her best to get something out of this praktik.
    “Yes,” Gunnar found himself saying. Christina had told him to correct the Afghan girl's Danish when she said something wrong but he felt self-conscious speaking to her. Let Christina deal with correcting mistakes, he would just… do what? What was he doing with this girl in his house?
    “We shall go see the bees,” he said to her finally and opened the old wooden wardrobe in the garage.
    It had been his mother's and when she died he had inherited it along with other furniture. Maria had wanted some pieces, like the big wooden chest and Arne Jacobsen chairs, and the old rocking chair that had been his father's had gone to Julie. Anna had complained about the cost of shipping it all the way to London but Julie was determined to have the old chair.
    So Gunnar had sanded it and put on a new coat of paint, while Anna had sewn new pillows. She had chosen dark colors so that when something spilled on the cushions they wouldn't stain, even though she knew that Julie would have preferred something light, maybe pale yellow. If there was one thing Gunnar didn't like about Anna, it was how she easily disregarded what others wanted if she felt what she was doing was better.
    “But this is better for you,” Anna would say calmly when Gunnar protested, and he would quietly agree.
    The Afghan girl looked curiously at the white protective suit.
    “Put it on, otherwise bees will sting,” Gunnar said.
    Her eyes wide, she put the suit on. It was a bulky white shirt paired with bulky white pants. The suit had belonged to Anna and Gunnar hadn't wanted to give it to the Afghan girl but he knew it was silly to be so sentimental about the suit. Anna wouldn't have minded.
    Gunnar handed Raihana a hood and veil and blue gloves, which she also put on. She looked a little silly, but everyone did when they put on the protective suits.
    He picked up a bottom board and started piling things on it: extra frames they had just wired, an empty box to add to the colony if it was getting ready to swarm, and packets of white sugar candy for the colonies that needed extra food. Then he got out his tool belt and checked for his knife in the enclosed leather pocket. It was all coming back to him, and the difference between how much he used to love all of this and how cumbersome it felt now didn't escape him.
    “Let's go,” he said.
    She waited as he stuck one of the smokers into his tool belt. “No suit for you?”
    “No,” Gunnar said.
    “Will not the bees be biting you?” she asked.
    “No,” he said. “They know me.”
    Did all the bees know him? Raihana wondered. How could they? What about the bees that were born while he was sitting in his dirty house drinking coffee and doing God knows what?
    She had not mentioned to Kabir or Layla about the bottles of whiskey she saw in the trash. She had also not told them that she went inside the house and cleaned it. She knew