What the Cedar Was Holding

By Sean S Licciardi

The bumblebee arrived in such a condition of concentrated outrage that for one moment I assumed someone must have insulted a flower.

She struck the window twice, then once more for emphasis, and hovered before me with the rigid fury of a magistrate uncovering corruption in a minor province.

“Bzzt,” she said.

I was still making tea.

“Good morning to you too.”

“BZZT.”

That improved my understanding of the situation.

Normally her grievances concerned matters that could be solved by opening a gate, moving a pot, or apologising to a rose. This was different. She stopped in the air and waited for me with none of her usual theatrical impatience.

When I followed her outside, the morning already felt uncertain, as though the day had not yet chosen its hour.

She led me past the rosemary and cracked stone trough to the cedar at the edge of the adjoining property: an old tree with the sort of peace that makes younger things seem restless by comparison.

Someone had nailed a removal notice into the bark.

The paper fluttered, official and vulgar.

The bumblebee hovered before it in appalled silence, then tapped the notice once with what I privately thought of as the Thorn of Rosedoor.

She had brought the thorn, naturally.

“I see it,” I said.

She turned towards me so slowly that I felt like a man judged by a creature no heavier than a Mesopotamian olive.

The notice announced that the cedar was scheduled for removal within the week.

“There may be a reason,” I said, because people often say stupid things when confronted with official stationery nailed into living wood.

The bumblebee made a sound so low and severe that it barely qualified as a buzz. It sounded like disappointment translated into insect form.

Then she flew to the trunk and placed both front feet against the bark.

At that exact moment, the cedar’s shadow moved.

The sun was behind me. The shadow should have stretched away across the ground towards the wall.

Instead, it lay at the tree’s feet on the same side as the light, dark and patient and entirely wrong.

The bee did not appear surprised. If anything, she looked grimly vindicated.

“You might have started with that,” I told her.

By midday the unease had thickened. Sound seemed to arrive out of place. A pigeon rose from the wall with the flap of wings I had heard a second earlier. Somewhere beyond the houses a dog barked twice, paused, and then barked the first bark again.

Then she flew straight into the cedar, disappeared among the needles, and returned to strike my sleeve. When she darted back to the same fork of branches, I finally looked where she wanted me to look.

There, in the fork of two higher limbs, sat a small nest I had never noticed before. A parent bird flashed in and vanished into the needles. A second later came the urgent, ridiculous cheeping of the very newly alive.

“Well,” I said.

The bumblebee hovered before me with the composure of someone whose key evidence had finally been recognised by a slower-than-ideal assistant.

That should have been enough.

It was not.

The storm came just before dusk, hard rain, one clean flash of lightning, then clear sky and dripping stone.

The thunder arrived the following afternoon, a single late crack under a blue, innocent sky.

By then the bark had begun to close over one corner of the removal notice, making the paper look less posted than absorbed.

I stood there with cold tea in my hand and understood, for the first time, that the cedar was not merely old.

It was occupied in more ways than one.

The bumblebee landed on the nail and looked at me.

She did not have to say anything. She had said a great deal.

I went back to the house and returned with a screwdriver.

The nail did not want to come free. It resisted with the stubbornness of a bad decision. The bee hovered by my shoulder throughout the operation with the stern concentration of a supervisor from an ancient union.

When the nail finally gave, it came loose in a spray of bark and resin. The notice tore along one edge. For one strange second the air around the cedar seemed to steady.

But the notice had only been the insult. The men with the tools were still due.

I called the local office, the property manager, and the number at the bottom of the notice. Eventually I found the heritage listing: old, valid, and apparently ignored. I said active nest and protected cedar often enough to make them sound like the title of a court case.

Two mornings later, the truck arrived.

I was already waiting beside the tree with printed documents in one hand and the torn notice in the other. The bumblebee sat on my shoulder with the composure of someone attending a hearing she had demanded personally.

The men climbed out, looked at the cedar, looked at the nest, looked at the paperwork, and then looked at one another with the resigned expressions of people discovering they had inherited somebody else’s stupidity.

No one reached for a saw.

There were phone calls, swearing of the administrative variety, and much studying of bark, branches, and forms. Then, with the caution usually reserved for active mines and complicated relatives, they packed everything back into the truck and left.

Nothing was cut.

That evening the cedar’s shadow lay where it ought to. The next day the air sounded like itself again. By the following morning the wound in the bark had already begun to close.

The nest remained quietly busy.

The bee visited the trunk once, pressed her feet to it, and returned to me with an expression I had learned to recognise as guarded approval.

I had thought the cedar was resisting.

Later, I understood it better than that.

The cedar had used the only language it knew: time.

- Note: Look out for the next story in this series of linked tales "The Fourth Six" in the next issue of AntipodeanSF - 

About the Author

Sean S Licciardi is a Melbourne-born writer with a background in maritime operations and a love of Argentine historieta.

His fiction blends precision, whimsy and a fondness for the gently absurd, often finding wonder in overlooked corners of everyday life.

His writing companions are Winston, a senior Labrador, and Sasha, a Rottweiler. They have influenced much of what he thinks about loyalty, curiosity and the small moments that matter.

He is currently typing.