Once upon a time there was a girl made of flower petals, and she was the beloved of bees. Her skin was stitched of pure white daisies; her eyes, periwinkles; and her hair, bright golden chains of sunflowers. Her dress was a shifting swirling mass of bees that hung, cloudlike, from her shoulders to her ankles. She ate only sunlight, drank only rainwater, and when she spoke drops of sparkling sweet nectar fell from her carnation lips. Never were they allowed to touch the ground.
This girl lived in a clearing surrounded by beehives in a green-gold forest in a far distant corner of the earth, a place where the world of cars and computer screens and hulking towers of steel and glass could only be smelled faintly on windy days.
It was one such day in early autumn, a crisp, cloudless day with a wind that made the trees shiver and yellowed the edges of their leaves and brought the sharp tang of civilization up from the south, when the girl wandered down from the hill where she habitually watched the sun rise and into a tangle of brush that she thought hadn't been there when she had climbed up.
She felt the brambles pulling her in, bidding her nearer, and she let her feet be pulled forward.
No comments:
Post a Comment