This is a story about the body.
What time is it?
I didn't.
Quarter of OK.
The young composer working that summer at an artists colony
had watched her for a week.
She was Japanese, a painter, almost 60,
and he thought he was in love with her.
He loved her work, and her work was
like the way she moved her body, used her hands,
looked at him directly when she made
amused and considered answers to his questions.
One night walking back from a concert, they came to her door.
And she turned to him and said, I
think you would like to have me.
I would like that too, but I must tell you
that I've had a double mastectomy.
And when he didn't understand, I've lost both my breasts.
The radiance that he had carried around
in his belly and chest cavity like music
withered very quickly.
And he made himself look at her when he said, I'm sorry.
I don't think I could.
He walked back to his own cabin through the Pines.
And in the morning, he found a small blue bowl on the porch
outside his house.
It looked to be full of rose petals.
But he found when he picked it up,
the rose petals were on top.
The rest of the bowl, which must have swept them
from the corners of her studio, was full of dead bees.