Weekly Writing Prompt 1: Girl in a Bee Dress

Emma and I have decided to share writing prompts every week so we don't stop. We both write on the prompt, with a deadline of midnight the following Sunday--finished or not. This week's is a painting by Maggie Taylor.

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The sun rose crimson that morning, into a sky as thick and golden as the richest clover honey. I woke with a feeling of finality, fatality, emptiness. I rose with the sun, the two of us mirrored--slow, silent, moving to a timeless, ceaseless rhythm we had no power to oppose. Padding softly on calloused toes, I stalked the dawn through the foothills. Heavy shafts of golden sunlight broke around me as I emerged onto the floodplain, following the footsteps of my mother, my grandmother, my whole line of apian girls. Between my fingers I carried--oh so carefully--the first flower of spring, a glorious zinnia as brilliant a magenta as I'd ever seen.

When I reached the shore the sun had reached its zenith, blazing down upon my naked skin with a joy it had waited the whole long winter to release. I sank my toes into the icy embrace of the ocean, grounding myself in the rough sand. Raising the flower's flawless petals to the sky, I closed my eyes and sang, pouring my soul into carrying the lilting melody across the water, calling, calling, calling with every fiber of my being. I sang until the sky had turned an evening's periwinkle, the sun lazily sliding behind a thick curtain of clouds.

My toes were the first to sense them coming, tingling with the deep humming that vibrated through the sand as my eyes scanned the gathering stormclouds on the horizon. Gradually, one cloud seemed to thicken, shifting restlessly and growing ever larger; the relentless hum filled my ears as the cloud filled the sky. The swarm swirled around me in dizzying eddies, the drone of millions of gossamer wings drowning out even the crashing of the waves, as countless fuzzy bodies drifted in the foam.

There were too many.

Every year, fewer and fewer flowers spread their petals on the hillsides for the bees... the land was dying.

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Yeah... this isn't anywhere close to done. Or even edited at all. Oh well. Maybe eventually I'll come back to it, but I kind of doubt it.