A Recipe for Bees by Gail Anderson-Dargatz Page A

wouldn’t be able to hear the alarm. She was desperate to reach him but somehow the space of living-room between the kitchen and the bedroom door stretched out of proportion, seemed so much longer than it was in reality. It took for ever to reach the bedroom, and when she finally did and cried out, “Wake up! There’s a fire!” the shrieking of the fire alarm stopped. There was no smoke. No fire. Even so, she made Karl help her check every electrical connection. She phoned Rose and made her go hunting around the apartment building for smoke. There was no fire. Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had been warned, of what she wasn’t sure.
    Augusta had begun walking in her sleep in her teens. She’d clamber out her bedroom window, then run around the house. Climbing in was a good deal harder than jumping out, so at the point of return, when she had to figure her way back through the window, she’d begin to wake up, conscious of what she’d done but not why. She would sense the chill of the early morning, the dewy or sharply frosted grass under her feet, but only just barely, as in sleep one was aware of the surrounding darkness and that darkness became incorporated into the dream. Anxiety was the trigger for her sleepwalking. That dream she had about the fire followed the vision she had of Gabe with the bee on his lip. And the sleepwalking she did as a teen started after the vision she had of her mother’s death.
    Just that day on the train, she had dreamed she had woken from sleep to find a hole had opened up in the train floor between her seat and Esther’s. There was no flash of passing ground as she would have expected. Instead,extending from the floor, there was a rectangular pit of sorts, though there was no dirt. The walls were white and smooth, and lit up from within, in the way snow seemed to glow from within on the night of a full moon. Esther was still sitting with her, smiling, swaying with the train. Her basket had disappeared, presumably into the hole, but the shasta daisies were on her lap. She handed them to Augusta and invited her to throw the flowers into the hole. When she did, the pit was suddenly full of flowers. Augusta stood to jump into those flowers, but Esther said, “Wait a while.” And so they sat together, swaying with the train, talking of inconsequential things, with the pit of flowers absurdly open between their feet.
    When Augusta awoke, into the real world this time, Esther was looking at her, smiling. “Did I snore?” said Augusta.
    “No, you were laughing.”
    That dream had the quality of a premonition, a dream foretelling her own death, though she didn’t want to believe that. Wasn’t she just preoccupied with Gabe’s illness? she wondered. With the possibility of his death, her worrying mind was manufacturing nightmares. Yet it hadn’t felt like a nightmare; Esther said she had laughed.
    Augusta set the phone back on the kitchen counter, then glanced at Rose as she sipped her tea. She wouldn’t tell Rose about the dream she’d had on the train, though she’d told her almost all her other premonitions. It would scare Rose to death. She believed in Augusta’s visions, considered them a gift, and was hungry for stories about them. And Augusta had no shortage of strange tales to tell her. She’d had more than her share of premonitions and ghosts.Even Olaf’s cabin had been haunted, or Augusta felt it had. It was a wretched house to live in, dark and full of squeaks and shifting timber. There was so little privacy. When she knew the men were out feeding the sheep, she bathed hurriedly near the kitchen stove, pouring warm water from the stove reservoir over herself with a saucepan as she stood in the square galvanized steel tub she washed laundry in, fearful that any minute she’d be caught naked in the kitchen. She never felt alone there, even when Olaf and Karl were in the mountains with the sheep for the summer and she was by herself for weeks on end. The