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46 the Grief Counselor’s Day off Goes for walks, but it’s no use. Grief everywhere, shooting up her nose, slicing her hair. The school bus goes by. Kids screaming in rows. She knows there’s a kid in there lost inside his baggy clothes, and another in the middle somewhere where he grows even more invisible, another with her mother’s pills, another cutting 666 and X’s and O’s into the fake leather of the seat in front of him. The girl to his left, her honeyed hair hiding her face, stares at her arm. Then another bus, bright as a bee, stops, goes. She walks into the woods past the playing fields. She’s been there before, past the condoms and beer cans where the weekend bonfires roar, past the burned-out place where the kids aren’t allowed to go anymore, to the hollowed-out tree that she visited last May where the quarterback hanged himself because he was gay. There’s a beehive in the hollowed part, perfectly gray, and the bees go in like buses at the end of the day, each one coming in, rumbling, pulling away. She hears their thousand-winged song, each sweet word that they say. She wants to warn them there’ll be this bear someday that will ravage them, rip at their lives, tear them away, but the bees tell her gently, in their own busy way, not today, not today, not today. ...

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