~ Blume ~
Packed close. My daughters’ bodies shiver around me. I feel the thrum of eggs under my abdomen. We sleep, a huddled mass of bees. I smell their dreams. Fresh flowers, heat at the tips of their antennae. Soft, sweet scent of new eggs, the long tunnel to outside.
I flex my wings, shift my antennae, find the daughters whose nightmares smell like fresh venom and singed fur.
Flowerless deserts. Smell of burning. There are no other bees.
It stings, smelling their nightmares. I pull my antennae back, the tips tender with their pain. I do not dream except through my daughters, through the memories of my sisters. Mother bee. Not a maker of memories but a keeper of them. My daughters don’t call me queen like the human larvae boy does, they call me something he might translate as time t
