Shadows & Tall Trees Read Online Free PDF

that’s when she gave up on life and took on something else.”
    Yearned, yes. Her fingers squeezed and everything he thought to say turned to vapour. A door slammed shut and the floor overhead gave a long stuttering creak.
    “And maybe she came back with me in tow, her sprouting little girl. We purebreds have a quick gestation. A couple of years and I was menstruating. So I was able to watch you grow up. You don’t remember me keeping your dad company while Mother had gone inside herself to wait. The nights I slept over or the night I had a little too much to drink and his heart stopped beating for me.”
    She slipped his belt open and unzipped him. He was moaning already, trying to tell her to stop it, wanting to claw his way out from under the cabin, get to the car and drive anywhere that was away. “Maybe now is our time,” she said. “Onanon, without an end, and I mean you, too,” and she took him into her burning mouth and he lay in the fading light and shuddered.
    She climbed from under the cabin and left him still spurting into the dirt. He barely had the strength to tug his pants back up. When he emerged, the yard was empty and the sun had fallen behind the mountains. A bulging moon lifted. The teeth were still clenched in his hand. Biting his palm. He dropped them into a pocket and fastened his belt.
    He took a step toward the cabin and stopped. His mother peered out at him from a grimy window. The pane lifted up and a long pale tube slipped beneath it where her mouth should have been. It tapered and petaled. The rest of her face followed, eyes opening wide into wet holes.
    “Mom?” A liquid hum came from her as she wormed through the window. It took on a melody. He recalled the nurse outside her door and something stirred further back in his mind. “Mom?”
    She folded down onto all fours and scrabbled across the porch. Adam ran to his car. He was behind the wheel when he realized the keys were in the cabin. His mother dropped onto the hood and placed her hands against the windshield. Long blackened fingers splayed on the glass.
    He fell from the car and fled into the trees. The hum grew. Something vast pulled at the air. His mother, he thought, singing the sky dark. Songs of home. He ran through limbs and the rising sound of birds screaming as they escaped with him.
    Before long the land steepened and he came to the crook of the two hills, the cabin behind him and the far slope dipping down to the feet of the looming mountains. He saw bees dotting the ground at his feet. They had no wings. The sky was a blind expanse stretching from end to end of the earth. He gazed up at it and the stars were gone, whitish blurs in their place. As if they had been rubbed with pencil erasers.
    Leaves crunched behind him as he watched the heavens flicker to violet, to orange, to the brown of rich soil. The moon broke open like a fruit and the sun was already coloring the jagged horizon again. Hands slipped around his waist and up under his shirt, barbed fingers tracing patterns on the skin of his belly. He struggled and the arms locked him in place.
    Meli stepped up beside him. “Think of it as pollination,” she said, “instead of trying to wrap your head around the old human evolution bit. Every hive starts with one Queen. There will be many of us. You’ll get the hang of it when you feed. Look around you, the world is in bloom.” He watched her tongue slip from her mouth but it kept coming, a hollow, curved thing hanging past her chin and sucking at the air. Her eyes went black and he looked away, down to the ground covered with red and yellow and gold leaves and the sluggish bees trundling over and between them.
    He felt his mother’s proboscis push into the base of his neck. Her humming song vibrated there and a sweet numbness spread. She caressed him and at last he was able to remember the nights she tucked him into her arms against her breast, until he fell into his childish dreams and God knew what she had