Once, opening my bedroom door to find a moth I’d crushed flat against it, I remembered a bee from years before.
It was a summer afternoon. I was working on homework, restless and irritable in the glaring heat, when I heard a buzzing of wings nearby.
Already on edge from the work, I quickly found the source: a bee. I looked at it carefully. It had apparently wandered by accident into the gap between two floor-to-ceiling windows and was darting up and down.
I let out a small cold laugh and slid the two windows together. The gap between them closed, and what was left was a sealed glass observation box. I set down my pen and watched the bee wander tirelessly back and forth in that near-flat space, with no sense of where to go.
Its few-centimeter body struck the glass; the vibration of glass and wings echoed and amplified, making me more agitated still.
Clouds gradually covered the sun, and the light softened.
I decided to let the bee die pointlessly in its observation box. I picked up my pen again — and in the corner of my eye caught the bee beginning to waver. It drifted along the glass surface like a deflating balloon, growing slower and slower.
My throat seized up. When I came back to myself, the bee was resting on the windowsill, at the base of the floor-to-ceiling window.
Then suddenly a strong gust swept through. The clouds seemed to be parted by an invisible hand; the trees outside shook, green leaves flying. Sacred sunlight fell, and across the surface of the pond, ripples of golden light leapt.
The bee sprang back up from the windowsill and threw itself against the invisible wall.
Guilt flew around my chest like a bee. My muscles went stiff; my lips trembled. I was almost on the verge of kneeling before it.
That warrior charging toward the sky fell silent a few seconds later. Trembling, I pulled the window open. The bee lay curled on the sill, its tiny body still faintly moving.
It could no longer beat its wings, so I went and scrounged up some small pieces of fruit for it.
By the time I finished my homework, the bee was gone. I imagine it must have made it back to the wide-open world.