---

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You saw him once on the E train, during a moment of drowsiness. The Hat Man, or—as your abuela used to call him—El Silbón.

It was 4 a.m. and you’d just finished your graveyard shift at the 24/7 pharmacy. (Isn’t it funny, how strange things always appear to you at this ungodly hour of the morning?) You’d started to nod off on the train, and with the gentle swaying of the subway car, your mind began to wander.

It had been a long day at the pharmacy. At the drive-thru, the capsule had gotten jammed in the pneumatic tube, and you’d needed to reach your arm inside, up to the shoulder, to unjam it. During lunch, a woman had rapped on the grate to demand when the pharmacy would reopen. Time had passed with the meticulous clack of medication dropping into pill bottles, and so, when the realm of sleep finally yawned before you, wide open and inviting, you welcomed it eagerly.

It didn’t take you long to cross the border between the waking world and REM. When you closed your eyes, the subway car evaporated into the arid savannas of Venezuela. Your fatherland. The Nightlands. All around you, dead grass crackled. Birdsong flitted through the sparse trees, and herons crouched hidden in the watering hole. For the first time in ages, you felt at peace. But then, somewhere in the distance, a colony of bees began to drone, like the windup rumble of a starting lawn mower. The sound was hair-raising. Agitative. Almost immediately, your heart started racing at rabbit speed. You swiveled in a full 360, scanning the horizon for the noise, and then you saw him—a shadow man, standing on the far side of the watering hole, so tall and slender he could’ve been mistaken for a chaparro tree. As you drew closer, you tried to discern the details of his face—but no eyes emerged, no nose or mouth. All his features remained shadowed by his wide-brimmed hat.

The closer you approached, the more the man’s silhouette seemed to tremble at the edges. A trick of the light, you thought at first, until the buzzing rose to a deafening crescendo, and then you realized the Hat Man was surrounded by bees. Thousands of them, swarming over his flesh, and clothes. Like insects drawn to a rotten carcass.

At that moment, you woke with a start.

Back on the E train, the sliding doors hissed open, snapping you back to reality, and for a brief moment, the Hat Man followed you, into the transit system of Nueva York.

As soon as the sliding doors swished open, he stepped inside your subway car, his knees popping as he stooped to fit. The bees continued to crawl all over him, parting briefly to reveal a glimpse of skin here or a patch of white cotton there. In the dim overhead light, he looked something like Pumpkin Jack, a collection of slender bones held together only by ligaments and persistence. He limped his way down the aisle, scanning the rows of bright orange bucket seats, and stopped only when he spotted you.

With one hand, he dragged a black garbage bag. This, in itself, wasn’t strange. It was common to see homeless men on the subway, all their belongings shoved in a single bag. With his other arm, though, the Hat Man cradled a brass saxophone—a handsome Soprillo that looked like it belonged in a Harlem jazz club. It did not take the shape of a traditional saxophone. Instead, it looked almost insectoid, with its keys and levers splayed like various appendages. The brass surface of the keys had tarnished, you observed, from repeated touches. The same tone holes played over and over. C–D–E–F–G–A–B…

The Hat Man wasn’t the strangest thing you’d seen in the Nueva York subway, you had to admit, but he was certainly the most sinister.

Slowly, the Hat Man placed his hat on the bucket seat and then he began to play, teasing a melody out of the brass. It was as if you’d stepped inside the New York Philharmonic—or, you thought, as if the orchestra had stepped inside of you. The visceral melody rolled over you, C–D–E–F–G–A–B, but no one else in the subway car seemed to notice. The woman across from you remained glued to her phone, doomscrolling. At the far end of the car, a man dozed with his AirPods blaring.

Any other street performer might have been discouraged by the lack of onlookers, but the Hat Man continued to play dutifully for his audience of one.

For a while, you simply listened, frozen in rapt paralysis. Meanwhile, everyone else cast their eyes downward. (This is the customary habit, when a panhandler comes begging for money. Ignore them. Stare at messages on your phone. Don’t make eye contact, and eventually they’ll go away.)

You were the only one who truly noticed the Hat Man, but even then, his face remained faceless, buried under the throng of teeming bees. Even when you stared straight at the space where his eyes should’ve been, it was difficult to hold his gaze. Your eyes slipped from his countenance, like fingers on soap.

Even still, you remembered your abuela’s ghost stories, the Venezuelan folktales your father had always scoffed at. Mentiras, mentiras, he would’ve said. No hay fantasmas, Antonio.

But then, what would he know of ghosts?

You knew in your bones that this Hat Man was El Silbón. He was the violent ghost who wandered the llano alto region, haunting the bars and taverns, the marshes and bamboo grass. He must’ve gotten lost somewhere between the savannas of Venezuela and the concrete jungle of Nueva York; a nightmare who had made a wrong turn and crossed into the waking world.

When the E train arrived at the next stop, the Hat Man gathered his belongings, as if he’d just remembered an urgent appointment. He collected his hat. He slung his garbage bag over his shoulder and headed for the exit.

Most panhandlers carried dirty laundry in their garbage bags, but not the Hat Man. No, instead he carried bones. When he walked, you could hear the rattle of white minerals clattering. Calcium grating on calcium.

On the subway platform, he shook the bones out on the floor and started to count, as if to make sure every piece was still present and accounted for. In the floodlights of the station, the shapes were unmistakable. Scapula. Femur. Sternum. Vertebrae. The various pieces of a human jigsaw puzzle.

Once he had finished counting, the Hat Man gathered the bones again, scooped them back into his sack, and then knotted the garbage bag at the neck. Without a word, he turned and ascended the stairs, his bare feet scuffing on the concrete. Then he vanished, the gleaming brass of his saxophone fading in the darkness.

All this, in the time it took for the sliding doors to close again.

Once it became clear that no passengers intended to board from the empty platform, the doors sighed. BING-bong. The mouth of the train closed, once more, and the E train plunged back into the bedrock of Manhattan, and your paralysis slowly drained away, sensation flooding back into your limbs.

You stood, shakily, grateful that the nightmare was over, but as the lights screamed by outside the window in a flicker of dotted lines, something told you that this wouldn’t be your last visit from the Hat Man.

---

Now he appears at least once a week, on the way home from the pharmacy. You lock up the doors. You walk down Frederick Douglass Boulevard to the station at 116th. Sometimes he shows up under Central Park. Sometimes not till Columbus Circle. He seems to favor the E train over the A train. More stops that way. More stations where he can play his saxophone and pass around his hat for coins. There is no pattern, beyond that, as far as you can tell. He just appears wherever he pleases, and whenever you try to follow, he slips through the crowd and vanishes, elusive as sand sifting through your fingers.

You’re still not certain if he’s real, or just a nightmare.

What do you dream about? your roommate Danny asked you, once, and after a long, ruminative silence, you could only shrug.

I don’t know. Nothing.

A lie, of course. Your dreams are filled with shadow people. Like the huddled masses you pass outside the homeless camps in Hell’s Kitchen, the hands that grasp at passing bankers and insurance agents. Spare any change? Por favor. Mis hijos tienen hambre, señor.

Don’t worry, your doctor assured you. Seeing shadow people is a common symptom of sleep paralysis. But still, you worry, because it’s just your nature. You don’t worry that the shadow people will hurt you, though. Over time, you’ve discovered that they’re harmless. Instead, you worry what might become of them, the ones who fail to gather spare change from the waking world, the ones who vanish into the Nightlands, never to be seen again.

Finally, you spot the Hat Man in the hub at 81st Street. He appears on the opposite platform, playing saxophone for a group of oblivious tourists, and you rush for the stairs, determined to catch him this time. You don’t know what you plan to do. Maybe grasp the cotton shirt beneath his blanket of bees. Maybe shake the insects from his face and expose him to the surrounding passengers.

All you know is that you must touch him. You must prove he is real, ¿sabe?

You race after the Hat Man as he leads you towards the upper level. Through the throng of bodies. Hands, elbows, fingers, faces; all grappling at the mouth of the turnstiles.

Up ahead, a woman shoulders her way in through the emergency exit—the easiest way to bypass the turnstiles—and descends into the gloom, while the sirens cry foul. She bumps into you on the way down, a lingering musk of Marlboros and barbacoa tacos.

“Cuidado,” she snarls, then she is gone.

---

Inhale. The A train whooshes past you, on its way uptown. Exhale. Once it passes, the sudden vacancy of the tracks is all-consuming. All of Manhattan is hollow, you’ve learned; a respiratory system. Down here, the city breathes.

Even still, the heat of the subway station throbs in your head. It is brutal down here in the summer, even after dark. Hotter than a crockpot.

The Hat Man has disappeared, and now you look like a fool, standing in the middle of the station. Maybe he was nothing, you think. Just too much Benadryl. You did take a few tablets after you left the pharmacy, and you forgot to check the dosage. Maybe he was just a man.

Pero sé lo que vi; you know what you know, and the Hat Man was no fever dream. They say he comes for drunkards, so maybe he comes for addicts, too. Maybe he comes for the poor cabrons who just want to escape their headaches.

Have you been sleeping better? Since you moved out?

Danny did not seem to understand. Better. Worse. It is all relative.

How do you explain to him that some things just don’t go away? Sleep paralysis is an ailment that will plague you for the rest of your life, just like asthma or arthritis or Alzheimer’s. There is no cure; only treatment. It is chronic, the same way that your bee sting allergies are chronic. Ever since you were a child, bee stings would cause you to swell and swoon, lost in a world of apitoxin ecstasy. You don’t remember much from your episodes—just the vibrating tumult of honeybees, and your father shaking you, as if sheer force might snap you out of anaphylaxis.

You will always be a source of disappointment for your father. Your father, the man who made a living out of beekeeping just like his abuelo and bisabuelo, who had hinged everything on this business, never suspecting that his only son would abandon the family legacy. How could a boy allergic to bees become a beekeeper? Ever since your first episode, he had wrestled with this cold awakening—this realization that he would be the final man in a long line of beekeepers. The end of a chain, irreparably broken.

Failure, it seems, is a chronic condition, a hopeless state that you can never escape.

In the 81st Street station, you place your finger on the subway map and trace the ascending lines. The sound of the Hat Man’s saxophone still haunts you, intensifying as it rises through the scales. C–D–E–F–G–A…his melody goes—and then down at the end, down, plummeting an octave to that subterranean B.

On a whim, you take the B train south. To Columbus Circle and then farther, into Midtown. You want to see what happens when you reach the end of the melody.

---

How does the story end? you asked your abuela once. The story of El Silbón?

Well, El Silbón killed his father, she explained, and then he fed the remains to his mother, and then she, in turn, fed El Silbón to the dogs. It was an endless cycle of tooth and flesh, and now he is just a shadow who carries his father’s bones.

It is strange, you think, to wish your own father dead. But you’re sure the Hat Man had his reasons.

Some say El Silbón was nothing but a spoiled brat, a cabron who killed his father for failing to bring home venison from a hunting trip. Others say that his father caught him having relations with a young woman. His father killed the girl, and then El Silbón, in a vengeant rage, murdered him.

You don’t know which version is true.

All you know is the Hat’s Man’s melancholy whistle. It sounds nothing like merengue or gaita or calypso, with their vigorous rhythms. No, it is a somber, Northamerican kind of music. Jazz, you think, or more specifically, blues. Whoever hears El Silbón’s whistle is bound to die soon. That’s how the legend goes. But you like to think that his music carries no ill intent; he is just a musician. A soloist. A saxophone mating call, waiting for a passionate response.

Sometimes you wonder if he is searching for the girl. The one his father killed. Does he expect her to finish his melody?

Your father used to whistle like this, on the way home from church. Before you stopped attending, and stayed home to watch The Simpsons. Before he took his belt to you, and left leather stripes down your back. Stretch marks, you tell your midnight lovers, when they ask. If they ask. From my growth spurt. The story is plausible enough to avert further questions.

You wonder if this belt was a tradition your father learned from his father, and him from his. A vicious circle of blood and anguish.

Do you plan to call them back? Danny asked you finally. Your family?

You don’t. And over the summer, your inbox has grown heavier with unread messages. You’ve stopped listening to the voicemails from your primos. Your tías. Your mother.

The day you left, your mother called you out in front of your cousins. Tossed you to the dogs. College can wait, Toño. Your father might not be here when you come home for Christmas. Maybe he will be in hospice by then. Maybe he will be dead.

Her words were scalpel-precise, designed to cut you in all the right places.

How can you think of only yourself at a time like this?

How could you explain to her that your father had already died long ago? When he planted the campaign sign in his yard, Latinos para Trump. When his memory began to unravel. When he boxed your ears, para enseñarte a escuchar, he claimed, niño ingrata, but you couldn’t listen when your ears were ringing. Before the demons of lunacy furrowed his brow into the face of a stranger.

It’s not his fault, they all say. We don’t choose our maladies.

You want desperately to believe them.

After El Silbón murdered his father, it is said that his grandfather punished him by tying him to a post and striking him repeatedly with a whip. His abuelo beat him senseless. That’s how the story goes. Beat him till he was listless and bloodied, on the cusp of death.

Then, instead of striking the final blow, his abuelo cast aside the whip and waited for him to heal. He would clean El Silbón’s wounds with chile peppers and lemon juice, just to watch him writhe in agony. He would wait until the pus had drained and the flesh had closed. And then, he would raise the whip again, and return to his bloody work.

---

Stepping off the B train, you spot him once again. At 42nd Street, the Hat Man stands patiently on the platform, as if he’d stopped just to wait for you to catch up.

Here, the Hat Man leads you upwards. Cement steps ascend to the surface world, and the whole time, you watch his shoulder blades bobbing ahead of you. Underneath the thinning mass of bees, underneath the translucent curtain of his shirt, white scars show through like crescent moons.

His flesh is lacerated. Crisscrossed with wounds that will never heal.

Maybe you should keep your distance, a dim voice warns from the back of your mind. After all, El Silbón is a ghost who inflicts violence wherever he goes, murdering drunk men and dragging them off into the grassland.

You can’t imagine the Hat Man would harm you, though. He just seems lost and friendless. Like you, the day you arrived at Columbia University. The two of you could be kindred spirits, both wandering the streets of Manhattan.

Ever since your abuela told you the ghost story, you have chosen to believe the version where the father kills El Silbón’s lover—not the version where El Silbón was evil from the start. You’ve always wanted to believe that El Silbón’s violence was justified. That his rage stemmed from heartbreak. Love, you think, can destroy people. And you’ve always wondered how far you would go for love. If it would twist you the same way it twisted El Silbón.

Outside, it is barely light enough to see. The streetlamps gather moths, as if the bulbs are laden with honey or sweet fruit, instead of dim glowing filaments. Overhead, the lights gleam like eyes, burning with curiosity.

In a way, you can understand why the moths are fascinated by light bulbs; after all, it was this same quality that drew you to Deepa, the Pakistani student who sat next to you in World  Literature.

It began gradually, at first; it was only after you’d huddled your heads together over The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in study group, only after you’d grown to know her a little, that she began to grow on you, like a creeping vine. Wisteria maybe, or bougainvillea.

She already knew English and Punjabi. Wanted to learn Spanish and Portuguese and Arabic, to become the black-belt master of a dozen languages. Together, you perused the used bookshops of the Upper West Side, from Columbia University down to Columbus Circle, wandering from one teetering stack to the next, brushing clean the spines of yellowed volumes and sneezing from the dust motes. In her company, you discovered that gulab jamun (her favorite snack) tasted just like your abuela’s tres leche cake, and dal (her comfort food) was reminiscent of your father’s garbanzo stew. You fell head over her heels for her thin-lipped smile, for the filaments of her eyes—and behind them, the sleepless thoughts that fluttered like moths.

During the witching hour, she would curl up in the window seat with an unfinished book and stare out at the streets below, her thoughts steeping in a midnight brew. You were always careful when you approached her, afraid you might startle her from her trance. Deepa had always loved the dark. The shadows. She would often wait until dawn, just to see the new day bleeding through the blinds and then—only then—would she turn in.

She was the one who taught you how to love the night and not just fear it.

In the darkness, she told you once, everyone is equal. An old Hindi proverb. Something she’d inherited from her grandparents, while you had inherited only scorn.

One morning, while she catnapped under the venetian blinds, you tried to imagine introducing her to your father, tried to imagine a scenario where he wouldn’t scrutinize her with his beady eyes. Maybe he would mistake her for Guyanan. Maybe he would find this acceptable.

What would he say, though, if he knew where she was from?

Damn immigrants. As if he wasn’t one himself. Flooding in from those Muslim countries.

His words would echo the TV set, which he left running at all hours, even when he slept, even when he wandered out of earshot. The running commentary of Fox News was pervasive. The voice of a hive-mind. Of groupthink. The perpetual drone of apis mellifera. Over time, the channel seemed to fuse with the gray matter of his brain, until he ate, drank, and slept on the same frequency as everyone else in the colony.

If you had introduced him to Deepa, then he would’ve paced the hallway, consumed by choleric energy. What about your family, Antonio? We need you here, to help with harvest season. You know I can’t drive the harvester anymore, not with these damn tremors. He would’ve held up his useless hands, the fingers warped by age and motor decline. ¿No lo ves? We need you, Antonio. On the word need, he would’ve slammed his hands down on the table, for emphasis. Is some foreign girl really more important than your own family?

Would you have gone as far as El Silbón, you wonder, to defend her?

It is all irrelevant now, because Deepa has returned home to Karachi for the summer, while you stayed in Manhattan. She hasn’t written you in months. Even still, you like to think you would have spoken out against your father. You like to think.

Now the night drags on, and the Hat Man lurches onward, too, under the canopy of cement-bound trees. Together, you pass the crouched lions outside the library. In Bryant Park, you pass the perfectly manicured hedgerows, no doubt the work of some tireless caretaker, and the Hat Man stands like a solitary tree, keeping watch over the grass.

“Why haven’t you killed me?” you ask him. “Why haven’t you added me to your sack of bones?”

The Hat Man is silent, save for his characteristic saxophone notes—but this lonesome lament, by itself, speaks volumes. Por que. His melody seems to say. Tenemos más en común de lo que crees.

Street level. The wee hours of morning are punctuated by early-stirring sounds. A taxi’s engine sputters. A street vendor wheels his food cart northward. The wordless buzz of a thousand voices murmur, even at this hour.

A dog barks in the distance, and the Hat Man retreats, spooked. Back into the sweltering subway. He never liked the sound of dogs, because it was the hounds that tore him apart.

Sometimes you wonder if you should get a dog. Maybe it will keep your specters at bay.

Or maybe, you think, you ought to stay away from the one thing that spooks even ghosts.

Amanacer en Midtown. Glass and steel gleam brilliant in the first light. When you holler into the canyon of Manhattan, the rock doves scatter—just like the puzzle pieces your father tossed on the floor in a fit of rage. Even the slightest irregularity would set him off; the missing jigsaw piece was somehow your fault. You had stolen it. Hidden it. You were trying to trick him. It was all your fault. For hours, he would crawl around on his hands and knees, hunting for those piezas de rompecabezas, and it wasn’t funny, really, but you were always amused by the Spanish word for “puzzle,” the way it translated, quite literally, to “breaks my head.”

Even now, you’re still not entirely sure what broke him.

The Hat Man is gone now, so you cross the street. Descend to Herald Square station and take the transfer. The Q train to Brooklyn.

You drift across the platform, still half asleep, and the subway doors close behind you with the ominous BING-bong that signals the train’s departure. You still haven’t quite grown used to this sound. On your first day in Manhattan, your backpack got snagged in the closing doors, and Danny needed to yank it free. Watch your back, he’d warned you, and you’d turned to face the warped reflection of your face in the window. No one else will watch it for you.

---

On the Q train, all is fluorescent. You swim through a sea of teeming people. On all sides you’re surrounded by strange faces and unfamiliar tongues: Mandarin, Hindi, German, Portuguese…. Sometimes even the Spanish sounds foreign to you.

Elbows shove you from behind. Mouths mumble “Watch it” instead of “Excuse me.” Heads tilt upwards to scan the arrival boards. On the PA speaker the conductor makes an announcement that is half-intelligible and half-static. An alien language, almost.

As a kid, you’d always loved watching Spirited Away. The anime film. Director Miyazaki’s masterpiece. For some reason, your favorite moment was the lonely scene where Chihiro rode the Sea Railway to the end of the line. Swamp Bottom. It was hypnotic, the way the water rippled as the train sliced through the flooded valley. It all felt familiar somehow. The shadow people in the train retrieving their luggage. The Doppler effect of the passing warning system. The tinny sound of bells, snatched away into the night…

When another train passes you on the subway, there’s a deafening ROAR as the passing drafts make friction. The trains themselves never touch, but the gusts of wind loathe each other, hollering as they rush in opposite directions.

In a way, the passengers are no different. This city is filled with strangers, like the woman who bumped into you at the 81st Street station. People who will snap at you, if you jostle shoulders or even glance at them the wrong way. Many are hostile. Some simply brusque.

In spite of this, though, you can’t imagine living anywhere else.

Why go to Nueva York? your father demanded, when you broke the news that you were leaving. (Maybe this was what finally broke his head.) That place is full of criminals. Bastards who will rob you or stab you on the subway.

He had always preferred the rolling hills of rural Pennsylvania to the nightlife of the city. He was born for the rust-belt lifestyle. Or rather, bred for it. For him, Butler County was the closest surrogate to the llano alto savanna. If he closed his eyes and breathed that smoky air, then he could almost mistake it for home.

He liked sleeping lighter than a buoy. Rising at the crack of dawn. The morning would begin in earnest; a breakfast of eggs and arepas con queso, followed by a brisk walk through the acres of yawning grain. To be awake during the witching hours, he claimed, was unnatural. Unhealthy. Contra las leyes de la naturaleza. He never used the lamps or light switches. He followed, almost religiously, the rising and setting of the sun. He never understood why you would wander the kitchen at night, why you would eat alone, illuminated only by the stark bulb of the open refrigerator.

Why Nueva York? your father had demanded. Of all places?

Because, you wanted to say. Because the night is beautiful and you don’t want to miss a minute of it. Because in the City That Never Sleeps, a person could simply lose himself in the teeming crowd—just vanish without a trace—and some part of you has always wanted to vanish.

---

Now, staring into the smokescreen of the subway window, you try to picture your father in a hospital bed. What would he look like, you wonder, with alien tubes streaming from his nose? With the monitors pulsing and pinging around him?

By now, the leukemia must have started eating away his bones. Simply walking from his bed to the bathroom must now be a herculean task. Soon, simply breathing will be difficult, so he will huddle, shriveled, in the hospital blankets, like an insect curled up in its shell.

His metamorphosis will be Kafkaesque. Sudden and disillusioning.

Before long, the ventilator will breathe for him, forcing oxygen through his airways, and sucking out carbon dioxide. When he wants to speak, he must rattle the bed frame, until your mother hands him a writing pad and pen. He will press the call button for the nurses repeatedly. He will write your name, in his illegible scrawl. ¿Dónde está Antonio? Or maybe he will forget your name entirely. Maybe language will escape him. He will simply point at a childhood photo, as if to say. That boy. Where did he go?

Each inhale and subsequent exhale will become ragged—a completely different sound from the respiratory system of the Nueva York subway. Instead of the passionate whoosh of a passing train, there will be only the regulated hiss of the ventilator. Controlled breathing. Machine breathing.

Please, you think, don’t ever let me breathe that way. You want to breathe for yourself or not at all.

This was just one reason why you refused to visit, even when your mother pleaded with you over the phone. Won’t you come and visit one last time? she told you. It’s too late to save him now, Toño.

But then, you already knew this.

Even before the leukemia diagnosis, his mind had already begun to deteriorate. Gray matter melting into the honeycombs of a vast beehive. Here, his thoughts swarmed through convoluted tunnels. Eat. Forage. Sleep. Repeat. The foot drills of a drone bee.

When he was a child, your father used to work on a bee farm near El Pao. Un granja de abejas. He took you there once, to show you how to collect honey. To show you how it was done.

You don’t remember the six-hour plane ride; in the end, it was lost in the folds of sleep. Somewhere along the way, you drifted off, and not even the turbulence could shake you awake. Similarly, the drive from Valencia was a blur. Out the window, everything was wheat-colored and homogeneous. Miles and miles of shrubby countryside. Your father didn’t play the radio; he preferred to drive in silence. Instead, he tapped his thumb along the steering wheel, the metronome of some internal melody, a mystery to you.

The body of water is what you remember best. When you arrived in El Pao, it was the only thing to see. A gaping lake carved from the landscape. And along the shore, a honey farm.

You’d always thought that beekeeping was a brave line of work. Either that, or a foolish one. In order to collect the honey, your father would sink his fingers into a sea of swarming stingers, would slide the honeycombs from their slots and scrape the sticky goo into a bucket, while the bees seethed in furious circles. His gloved hands were deft and seasoned, gently sweeping the bees out of his way with more tenderness than he’d ever shown you.

Bees are loving creatures, he told you. Pero cuidado, chamaco. If you grow too bold, they just might sting you.

That summer, you grew too comfortable. When your father turned his back, you plunged your bare hands into the teeming hive. You thought you would tame them, just like he did, and when your fingers emerged, oozing with honey, they were swollen and knobby, more like ginger roots than fingers. Your flesh was punctuated by a dozen stingers, but strangely, you didn’t feel a thing. It would all catch up with you later.

That was the day when you discovered you were deathly allergic to bees. It was the first time you’d ever gotten stung, and, dimly it occurred to you, it might also be the last.

You don’t remember how you returned to the farmhouse. Maybe your father carried you. All you remember is the slow swaying of your limbs beneath you, as you drifted phantom-like over the grass. Then, the slam of a door. The plush of an overstuffed mattress. The welcome opioid of sleep.

That was the first time you visited the Nightlands. The first time the shadow man came to your bedside and stood watch over you. The bee venom bled into your dreams and turned everything amber, the sickly color of honey. You couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak. All you could do was stare straight ahead, as the shadow man approached, slow and silent, and sank down, with a popping of knees, at your bedside.

That night, the shadow man hunched over your bed, wearing the face of your father, and he cleaned your wounds with iodine, though it felt more like lemon juice and chiles. The gauze burned when your father dabbed at your swollen skin, but it was his words that stung most of all.

I knew it was too much to ask, he hissed. The first early symptoms of the monster that would later claim his mind. Too much to expect you would learn the trade. Seven generations of apicultores and it all ends here.

His tool belt clattered when he left the room, a rattling bag of bones.

By morning, sunrise had taken an edge off the pain. But even though the throbbing had faded, the memory had not. All day, you watched him go about his work from the window, and you tried to explain away the monster that had taken the guise of your father.

You still remember watching him stride home from behind the granero, a shadow man swathed in a beekeeper’s suit, surrounded by the smoky shroud of dusk. You still remember the wide-brimmed hat, with the veiled netting draped over his shoulders. With the netting in place, his face was indistinguishable from the mesh of the barbed-wire fence, from the crosshatched leaves of the jacaranda trees. He seemed less like your father, and more like a creature from another planet. A ghost, come to spirit you away.

Your father used to whistle as he carried the buckets of harvested honey, a slow and wistful melody, C–D–E–F–G–A–B…

The memory melts like honey, though, raw and earthy, until it becomes indiscernible from the notorious smog of Nueva York.

---

“Hey, is this your stop?”

Back in the beehive of Brooklyn, now. The woman’s voice is jarring, but tender. Not the snappish dog’s bark you expected from a New Yorker. Maybe she’s not a native New Yorker, but just another visitor, like you. Another lost soul sleepwalking her way through the grasslands of night. Maybe no one is truly native to Nueva York, you speculate, but everyone is simply passing through.

It is only here, beneath Brooklyn, that your sleep paralysis finally drains away. You shake your way out of the groggy Nightlands. You shake loose the grasping hands of the shadow people who surround you. Por favor, señor. Do you have any quarters?

Morning arrives with the hiss of the subway doors–the final echoes of a dying ventilator miles away—and you wake, disoriented, on the shoulder of a stranger who was too kind to push you away.

 

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JULIAN RICCOBON (he/him) is a Latinx writer, editor, and artist and is the managing director of Polyphony Lit. His work has been published in Huizache, The Acentos Review, Flash Fiction Online, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Blue Marble Review, F(r)iction, and Teachers & Writers Magazine, among other places. He is of mixed European and Afro-Caribbean descent and often writes contemporary fiction and magical realism centered around Latinx culture and history, mental health, anxiety, religion, and dysfunctional families. You can find him on Instagram @julianriccobon and Twitter @JRiccobon.

 

Featured image by Carlos Martinez, courtesy of Unsplash.