Passing Through

I remember when I came to visit for the Spring Festival, all those strangers around us, dancing and suffocating me with their sweltering bodies, and the subsequent fever that lasted into my final day.

“Put everything on it,” I said. “I want the greenest lawn in all the world. I want people to look at it and think Helen lives here.”

The honeycomb is perfect for learning math. “Exact hexagons,” it says. I like that word. It’s a word my mother would have liked, too—she was a word person.