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The Boy Who Kept the Bees
Ashcombe keeps its bees on a south wall above the low orchards, and a hive that one family has tended for six generations becomes a small god with a job, and the job is the orchard.
- ~16 min (estimated)
- 3637 words
- 15 scenes
- 2 branch points
- 3 endings
34 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
Cover art · art review pending · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
Wen Halloway is sixteen and has kept the hives since they were eleven, under a contract that ran out in the autumn and was never renewed. Renewing it would have meant agreeing to what the contract actually says. The hive is owed a fifth of the harvest, every year, and six generations of Halloways have taken that fifth without once asking. Nobody has told Wen. The god has begun to ask. Its bees have left the pear rows, built comb in the wrong archway, and filled the frames with honey thin enough to run before it is capped. Wen has three weeks of bloom to find somebody in the village who can afford to make a god an offer, and their mother will not say why the paper was left unsigned. Bram Ockley kept the stand before them. He is thirty-nine and has been coming up to the wall at four in the morning for six years, feeding hives out of his own wage. At sixteen he was sent up to ask the hive w
Content notice7 topics · tap to review
- An unpaid debt owed to a small god
- A family that read a contract wrongly, then rightly
- A sixteen-year-old worker, never a romantic interest
- Institutional pressure and a collector's office
- A blight year and a lost crop
- A bound four-year labour term with no exit
- A permanently unanswerable question
Cast
- W Wen Halloway Keeper of the forty-four hives and the viewpoint character no portrait yet
- B Bram Ockley The last keeper, six years gone strange about the bees and not able to finish the sentence no portrait yet
- I Ilde Sarn The woman who wrote the current contract, seventh of her name to hold the tin box no portrait yet