The back door sighs. Ted hums, nervous, as he steps inside. It’s the end of everything. She stands very still in the dark skep of the cellar, listening, battery running down. She’s grown so exhausted, so old in this patched and scabbed autumn, listening to the dark drone of the past, sealing off what little she has.

Now Frieda’s joyous squeal, piping as she patters to keep up with Ted’s distant movements through the house.

She can’t bear the dumb tension. He’s searching for her, quiet, not calling—his voice a mere drone as he mumbles to Frieda, as he climbs up and down the staircase. How would she ever make it; how would she ever manage alone? All she’d wanted was honey, pure and sweet; he hadn’t wanted even that. Not the bees, not the hive—but it was hers now. Nectar to ward off the loveless death whose footfalls grow closer. She steps back against the shelf where she’s placed her six jars, pinching her shoulder blades against the wooden planking, secreting her honey behind her back. Hoarding her honey, her potatoes, her six balsamic poems of this last burnt week, all her fetishes; her mantic pink paper from Smith, her apples, what was left of her heart. Her heart that kicks and throbs, urgent to get it over with, waiting for the confrontation.

Darkness drops like a veil as the flashlight stalls. The sweet vapor of her honey wafts in the blackness; she breathes it in like air, a Delphic elixir against the terrible sick smell of her immobilizing fear. She is back in the dark, the deadly cellar. Is it really over, the end of everything? She takes a deep breath of her honey’s euphoric scent, tonic to this free-flying peril, the maddening drone of silence and waiting.

She hears the dull scrape of Ted’s black boot, the rustle past the brooms and aprons, and the cellar door’s creak. An angle of light breaks through the opening door, across the shelves and bins, the straw. As he enters she turns to face him, sweeping the flashlight, which shines, for a fleet moment, across his real face; then, as she lowers its sputtering beam, shadows him, angular and weird, like a phantom.

Ted looks at her, mental contortions struggling forth.

The answer comes. She will risk nothing. She is ready to speak, the words clustering in the black hive of her mind; her ear, that flower, awaiting her own voice. It is hers now. She is the owner. She stands defensive, her winter stores gathered behind her. She will get through another year. She will live on, resourceful. She forecasts her authority on a lie she wills to truth. She won’t flinch:

“I want a divorce.”

Whatever Ted had dressed himself in, whatever protection or disguise, falls away.

She shudders—it is so cold—before he nods and turns to pack.