Free Of Bees and Mist by Erick Setiawan

secluded corner where the poets starved, they saw a merchant hawk blood, breath, and bones for the ailing. When spring came, they sat for hours in little garden cafés, sharing, to the exasperation of the waiters, a cup of rice pudding. Sunset often found them in Independence Plaza, for at that deserted hour the town founder raised his marble fist and the rough cobblestones thundered with the march of an invisible army. If Meridia was aware that she was retracing some of her adventures with Hannah, she kept the thought to herself. She felt she owed it to Daniel to capture every sight afresh, unmarked and untainted by a previous memory.
    Daniel taught her how to interpret the stars. One night they scaled a secluded promontory and spied upon the lady in the moon. Another afternoon, they dipped their feet in a spring of immortality while archaic turtles nibbled at their toes. He took her to golden fields of lilies, and, on a broad plain of grass, they listened to bald nuns ululate with the wolves. From these jaunts, Meridia learned that they lived in the only part of the world where snow fell but never chilled, where the sun blazed with tropical intensity but never scorched. Viewed from the same secluded promontory, the town with its neat streets and ordered houses appeared bathed in an otherworldly light. The brightness of this light was matched only by Daniel’s eyes, shining with life and vitality as he initiated her into the mysteries of the earth.
    One day, he was explaining to her the paths of summering birds when she asked him, “How do you know all this?”
    “My father,” he answered. “He thinks the secrets of the universe are far easier to understand than a woman’s heart.”
    Daniel said this with such a straight face that Meridia laughed. Little did she know that many times in the years to come the words would return to haunt her.
    In a short time, Meridia fell into devastating love. Without hesitation she forged Ravenna’s signature and excused her absences from the school with imaginary illnesses. At the bookshop next to the courthouse, she studied the fashionable magazines that Hannah had found so indispensable, and for the first time in her life took their advice to heart. She used up her allowance on shoes and dresses, on velvet hats and gloves and lotions, all of which lost their appeal the second she unwrapped them at home. She fought tooth and nail against the apparitions for a space in the mirror, and stoically ignored their catcalls when they allowed her reflection to appear. One morning, it was Gabriel who caught her while she examined herself in the hall mirror before school. He frowned at her lace dress and glossy pink lips, but before he could say a word, she bowed and swept to the door with the arrogance of love shimmering in her breast.
    Every night she feasted on her memory of Daniel. Neglecting her studies, she summoned him through sighs and whispers, rendering in her mind his deep eyes and chiseled jaw and full lips parted on the verge of a kiss. At the stroke of midnight, the smell of his skin magically filled the room, a heady scent of sun and sea that braced her unlike anything she had ever known. Meridia smiled with pleasure at the remembered touch of his hand. Reliving a single, fugitive glance down the side of his throat drove her mad with longing. In the infernal hours, the bed creaked under her delirium, and sleep, if it came, offered no refuge from the tempest in her blood.
    After they had spent twenty-seven afternoons together, Daniel took her to a beach of pure white sand. Sprawled on a blanket under a palm tree, they were taking turns reading from a book when a dozen seagulls ripped the sky open with their wings. The birds were falling, plummeting fast out of the clouds as if they had been shot. Daniel dropped the book and jumped up. The seagulls landed on the sand not far from them, hopping and squawking like mad with their beaks pointed toward the sea. A minute later a wooden