I lean down into the box, as I did once before, and touch the skein of the honey. It is oily and warm, resistant to the pressure of my fingers. I push harder, and feel it give. I am stronger this time. When last I bent over the body of my son it was in grief and denial. I recoiled from the task even as I performed it, and my most devout prayer was that my hands pass through him as through a ghost, and the whole venture be revealed as a strange mistake. When finally he came loose and I knew the corpse was of my flesh; when I was forced at last to contend with the stark indissoluble certainty of his death: it seemed so unfair and so irrational. Of all the times and places for the world to be no more than it appeared, when butterflies in the wind may seem from the wrong vantage a troop of cavalry and by their presence bring nations to the brink of war, or the sighing of the sea whisper calumnies that end a man’s life—with all that, why must the truth in this one instance be so drab and unameliorable?