THE BEES ARE COMING
Alice didn’t want to go to Granny Joan’s house and Granny Joan didn’t want her to come. Alice spent the journey with her long chin turned to the car window. Her mum’s words skittered off her shoulders like rainfall.
“Bit of space… not coping…”
Alice saw people in colours. It was just a thing. Her mum was purple-nearly-black. She used to be sky blue but things change. Her dad had been yellow, a very important streak of hope in their family. She couldn’t see her own colour. All she knew was that when she and her mum mixed together they became a dreary boggy brown.
Granny Joan’s house was an old milking parlour in the middle of nowhere. Amidst all that green, Joan glowed red. Dragon’s breath. Fury. It made her difficult to look at so Alice tried not to, but she could still hear her, crackling and fizzing. Mum gave Alice another pill before she got back in the car.
“Just breathe,” she whispered in Alice’s ear. “She’s harmless.”
Alice found it difficult to believe her mum. She had watched her, in
