“Every time she cut our hair, after my brother and I had been carefully brushed clean, she gathered the blond hanks from the kitchen linoleum and rolled them between her palms. She carried these small skeins cradled in her apron, out the back door. She buried them there, in the same place where she dropped all of the tiny crescent moons of our nail clippings into the earth.

Our mother was not well. She pinched herself, and spoke to the bees…”

Read it, in A-Minor’s Sixth Anniversary special issue: Our Mother and the Bees.