Theme Week 11

Beginning to breathe Ray took in moisture steaming off blueberry bushes carpeting the ground from his shoes to the highway. The sun rising over hills opposite lit glistening water on a million leaves. It is steamy today. It will be better to get the bees moved before the sun gets too high. The move is only a mile, and better done at night, but it was early enough so the foragers were still in the hives.

Seven-year-old Dawson came running far down the barren toward his father, thick blond hair glinting.

Ray yelled, “Megan, I’m moving the bees. Can you kindly get our son back in the house?”

Dawson ran closer, his sandals spraying dew with every stride until his foot found a pothole, he fell, and his head planted firmly into the next hummock.

“Megan,” Ray urgently repeated.

The first rays of sun lit Megan’s blond curls as she looked out the window to where Dawson lay. Fear gripped her throat, breath halted. Hadn’t she thrown the deadbolt on the back door knowing Ray was disturbing bees? Instantly she grabbed the Epi-pen in the fanny pack by the front door, kicked onto the front porch, and pumped her long limbs. As she ran toward Dawson fear tightened, moving across her chest and into her stomach. She ran with abandon suddenly at her boy’s side pulling the Epi-pen out of its tube, the needle end unsheathed. She rolled him over.

Now remembering the first time he was stung, only two-years-old, when Ray was moving a hive up to the neighbor’s field. Dawson was playing in the sandbox; she could watch through the kitchen window while doing chores. Scraping baked-on eggs from the quiche pan she looked out, noticed Dawson swatting all around his head, then down his body, furiously sweeping with the back of his hands.

Now tears welled up in her eyes as she held the adrenaline bearing tube above her seven-year old son’s leg. All she could see in her mind’s eye was his puffy body lying still in the sand when she stared unbelieving, panting over the sand box. Now kneeling in the cool green leaves looking at his bear leg, was it all puffed up like in the sandbox or was it normal? The words of Dr. Miller echoed in her head. “It can’t hurt him to get a shot of adrenaline, but waiting too long to administer can be fatal”

She plunged the tube at his right thigh sinking the needle a quarter inch into his flesh. He bolted upright, wide-eyed yelling, “Bad Mom! You said I get jabbed when I had the hives all over me. Where are the hives, I don’t see any hives, I don’t have itchies,” Dawson screamed, tears now pouring down his face. She went to hug him but he pushed her away. She noticed that his face was normal now. Had the shot worked that fast?

In the sandbox, it was nearly ten minutes before the ambulance arrived and the EMT gave the shot. She noticed, swaying along in the ambulance, that she couldn’t see any of his freckles. The paternal, balding EMT kept asking “How long ago did he get bit? How long has he been unconscious? Is he allergic to any medications?” While the younger, intense black-haired EMT bent down over Dawson sticking an IV needle in his arm, talking over a headset to the emergency room.

She had not noticed any relief in the swelling until in the emergency room. There his color got better. She remembered when Ray finally came and he said that the boy looked blue; within a few minutes Ray said the boy’s color got better.

Dawson’s cries and blows brought her back into the present moment as she tried to hug him. Her boy never left the now. She gazed again across her boy’s face, down his arms, and over his bear legs. Every freckle was visible, skin pale except for the red puffy spot where the needle pricked his thigh. He was rubbing it now. Megan got her arms around him. She realized with a rush of relief that she had imagined the swelling, panic had raced her heart into that past place, sure her baby was suffocating. Tears streamed down her cheeks, she felt her face light up and flush with relief and joy.