Varroa Destructor

In the provinces, some still call it de vallende ziekte—the falling sickness. But it comes on differently for me: a slight tremor of the hand, an odd rush of calm, a moment of anticipation. Of what, though, I don’t know; I’m never there for what follows. Pietr calls my absences “flickering,” says I sometimes utter a word or two while I’m gone. He writes them down, but they rarely make much sense to either of us when I come to. I only know I’ve gone absent by the taste of clay in my mouth after, which is why Pietr brews his awful tea—to chase the taste away. Honestly, I can’t say which is worse: the gustatory hallucinations or his tea.

But then come the dreams, never far behind a flicker. Pietr has taken to writing those down too, whenever I can remember them. He says sometimes they mean something, however obliquely; other times, they mean nothing at all. The trick is figuring out which are which. I haven’t a clue, but he sees my flickers as a kind of tweede blik, or second sight. Pietr’s old enough to hold his superstitions close, so he sees a vestigial mysticism in anything he finds difficult to explain. As there is with the rest of us, I suppose, a remnant of the primordial we tend to ascribe to the unknown—like what happens during my seizures, what brings them on, why the dreams that follow often seem like divinations (or can be twisted about and worried at until they do). All I know is that not that long ago, my flickering would’ve branded me a witch. So, it could be worse. No stake awaits—at least, not yet.

Still, there are three baboesjkas living near the village who’ve decided I’m Rusalka, a particularly unquiet sort of river spirit. Their wrinkled faces screw up whenever they see me cross the bridge into the village, eyes beading beneath the scarves tied under their chins, gnarled fingers falling still in the little burlap bags of seeds in their laps. This, despite my never having flickered while out and about, never having gone absent in the market, or while having pils en vlammetjes at the Moderne—the only pub in the village, named without a molecule of irony. Then again, maybe it’s the other they sense, the in-betweenness. 

The way they look at me, I get the feeling they’ve an inkling of what I really am. I can only imagine what they’d do if they could be sure: clutching their satchels of earth, weaving their twig-and-straw talismans, spitting conjurations to keep me away from goddess-fearing folk. And if they ever got wind of what my name really means, I’m sure they’d put a pyre up on the square after all, unable to grasp that my parents, appreciating ambiguity, leaned into it, naming me Yasea—Spanish for either. My father’s pet name for me is even more on the nose: Nem, neither in Portuguese. But optimism and opportunity reside in both, and I’ve been neither scarred nor scathed by what I am, had no irreparable decisions forced on me as an infant. Despite their contrary mix of Dutch, Russian, and Serb ancestries, my exiled parents were ferociously progressive, taking pride in having produced a near-mythical being—a superstition of a different kind, I suppose. 

Which brings me back to the dreams. Most recently, the ones about the bees.

After my last flicker, Pietr said I mumbled Varroa while absent. Choosing his words more carefully than usual, he said an infestation was unlikely unless the Varroa had been deliberately reintroduced. His expression as he said this was subtle, but it triggered the new dreams, the ones in which I find the hives reduced to ghost colonies, with tens of thousands of drones—chalky white, drained of lipids, wings brittle as caramel shards—stuck lifelessly to the waxy combs, their ashen shells littering the bottom board, their queen left barren. But when I told him of the last dream, of the red owl returning to the huge oak behind the decimated hives, the darkling crease of his brow made me wonder what the babushkas would make of all this symbolism, with it having pricked so acutely Pietr’s own pagan ear.

He likes to remind me that every digital counterpart we’ve invented to correlate to what we call the real world are just new manifestations of the hidden world we’re all still moving through, as much as we like to tell ourselves we’ve shaken free of it, that we’ve evolved. He says that world, the one in which he keeps more of a foot than I do, remains as opaque, mystifying, and demanding of respect as ever. There’s pagan in all of us, he says; we’re just casting spells in a different language as we try to navigate three dimensions at the same time: the real, the virtual, the hidden. That’s just how Pietr sees the universe, how he thinks of his place in it, and I can’t say his shibboleths are misguided. Certainly, the babushkas seem to be seeing things that I can’t whenever I pass them on the square. 

Pietr would say that’s because they and I occupy the same space, but on different channels, on separate frequencies; that we can sense each other’s oscillations but are incapable of making direct contact. Maybe that’s what the in-betweenness really is, then—and not just the caprices of my errant chromosomes or the ambiguity of the body I occupy in this liminal space. Maybe there’s something to what Pietr says about ambivalence being the true nature of everything, in this or any other world, and that believing otherwise is nothing but the vanity of denial—that most primal superstition of all.

Cor de Wulf divides their life between the Pacific Northwest, Normandy, and the Zuid-Limburg region of the Netherlands—that idiosyncratic Dutch province being De Wulf’s home port for decades. Their short fiction has appeared in Every Day Fiction, Ink in Thirds, and Blood Tree Literature, which recently awarded De Wulf’s work first prize in its 2024 RE:BUILD contest.

A Song for Cor