The Beekeeper

Written for Gerry & Sue’s Weekly Prompts
Weekend Challenge using the word ‘alternative’.
Here’s where the prompt took me.

Raymond Lawrence had decided, after forty-three years in accounting, that he needed an alternative lifestyle.

He announced this at breakfast on a Tuesday. His wife, Bev, did not look up from her crossword.

“What sort of alternative?” she asked.

“The sort,” Raymond said with great dignity, “that involves a tent.”

Bev filled in seven across. “You get a chill at the movie theater.”

This was true. Raymond did get chilly at the movies. But that, he explained, was precisely the kind of self-imposed limitation he intended to leave behind. He was going to live off the land …. forage, whittle, perhaps keep bees. He’d watched four YouTube videos on the subject and felt confident.

He lasted less than a week in the wild …. which was, technically, the backyard …. before the bee incident. Nobody could prove the whittling was involved, but the evidence was suggestive.

Raymond returned to the kitchen on a drizzly Saturday afternoon, carrying a damp sleeping bag and what remained of his pride.

“There’s soup,” said Bev.

The soup was tomato. It was warm and it was perfect.

Raymond went back to work on Monday. But he did keep one bee. His name was Rex, and he lived in a jar on the windowsill; he was, Raymond felt, proof that a man could change.

Bev disagreed. But she let him keep the jar.