A Short Story by Jack Mint
Grass grows over most of the up and down landscape. A few places are islands of bare gravel. They are surrounded by yellowing halos where the green of that grass sank to somewhere else below the footsteps of ants. They proceed in the sporadic lines of a march step they’ve known forever creased in the crisscross nature of continuing.
Casting spritely shadows on the ants, bees peruse the sunlight on the clearing like marooned sailors. They look down mostly. They search for flowers the scouts had reported back at the hive. Bees dance to communicate the locations of food for the hive. They whirl their legs in stomps and flourishes as a thousand others only take a glance before a compelling feeling of duty moves them. The dance tells direction but cannot convey the concept of altitude. Flowers do not grow in the circular depressions pockmarking the landscape because the bees were not told in the dance about the craters in the grass. They build a new world of color and flowers without knowing they are instrumental in the complete transformation of their world. They know not the native grass plants transplanted by the arrival of a new flower because the only sound in their wings is the commitment to Honey, Queen, and Hive.
Flowers grow in the flats like purple and white fingers that reach from the tree line. Scientific names like lobeliaceae or taraxacum are unwritten along the blooms of color scraping the sky in the immensity of their own being, an inch above the grass. Their petals of flesh and brilliance burn like steel in the sunlight. They are unaware of their vulnerability from a cold wind or consecutive sunny days without rain.
A spider steps her hooks along the flower’s vertical precipice as she reaches out the layers of silk lines. Her eyes are oily pools of fervor waiting in the trenches of concentration. Another segment of the web complete and still her eyes wait without end to find the next feeding. When her fangs sink into the worried, web wrapped flesh of a pollinating bee,
she will taste what the world may have been
in a warm flavor uncommunicated through her unchanging eyes.
