The bees absconded from their hive in Georgia, headed south-bound to Florida — magically and maniacally — and settled under a palm tree in Little Havana. The hive, diaphanous and frail, felt amorphous at first. But thanks to the heat and the assiduous efforts of the Queen to overcome the atrophied western side of the palm tree, the nest reached a convivial atmosphere in a month, especially because a pool, on the other side of the pink wall blockading the south-side of the street with the north-side of the street directly south of it, had a life-guard, named Giovanni, who enjoyed slinging out the latest vapor tracks at the pool, which reminded him of his hometown, Naples, on the other side of the state, of going to the shore and sitting on a beach towel under two palm trees, two specific palm trees he liked, where he began/ended ephemeral relationships with pretty girl after pretty girl and, when alone, got rid of a lot of his stresses, feeling evanescent, as if wearing Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, despite his impecunious circumstances.
The vapor helped the bees make their own form of vapor, aka honey. Smooth sounds, vibrant, effervescent, all just one wave of light, where individuality disappeared in the sea of being, and where the palm trees, those entities high above of varying substances, unhinged their temporalities, collaborating with the water to form a culture, a world of sun and mosquito breeding spots of which the day knew nothing. The emergent power of that larger entity, Florida, became the paradigm worth making the vapor for. Culture begat culture, bee begat bee. And on and on, waver after wave, bite after bite, bee sting after bee sting, pool after pool, shore after shore, palm tree after palm tree.