I dreamed the hive was listening to me

I was standing at the edge of a field, and the bees weren’t flying—they were just… waiting. Not in a hostile way, not in a swarmy way. Just still, like they’d been holding their breath for years. And then one of them lifted its wing—just a little—and I knew it wasn’t a bee. It was my old queen, or something that used to be her. She didn’t speak, but I felt the silence between us like a sentence. I said, ‘I’m sorry I never checked your frame,’ and the whole hive exhaled. Then I woke up with my hand on the screen door, like I’d been about to go out there all along.