just a repost, critique welcome
"Not now, Zoey, dad's really busy!" the man in the green coat yelled nervously while flipping through a big stack of yellowish sheets of paper. Then he stopped. He took his glasses off and gently stroked his kid's blond head. "Go ask your mother, she knows about this kind of stuff."
The little girl turned on her heels and ran straight to the misty entrance of the burrow. The slim woman was singing cheerfully while dancing from one boiling pot to another, most certainly unaware of the aromatic clouds her culinary essays were creating.
"Yes, sweetie. What can I do for you?" she said smiling down to the impatient kid playing with the cord of her mother's apron.
"Mom, Maury said to me today that she will always be better than me because she is a pretty pretty butterfly and I am only a stupid yellow bee and even when I will grow up I will never see that many flowers as she will because she can fly from one flower to another and I can never fly because bees can't fly!" the girl cried it all out in a single breath, tears on the verge of rolling down on her cheeks. "Why can't bees fly, mom? Why can't we?"
"Come here, sweetie" the woman said leaning to the child and kneeling next to her. "Long long time ago, some wise scientists discovered that because our bodies are so heavy and our wing beat is so short, we cannot generate enough lift to fly... Yes, sweetie?"
"But, mom... we do not have wings!"
"Yes, indeed. But it wasn't always like this. When I was about your age, my great-grandmother who was the first bee to live in our burrow, told me that when she was a little girl she saw once, during Harvest Fest, a wingedbee". The woman put on a very serious expression, look cautiously around as to check that no one else was hearing her, and whispered to the amazed child "She also said that the wingdbee was very old and she was in a cage. Because she belonged to the Circus".
"A wingedbee, mom??? Like the ones in the cartoons?"
"Exactly like the ones in the cartoons, Zoey! How else do you think they would have managed to think of a wingedbee if nobody had ever seen one? There were wingedbees long ago, but nobody ever talks about this anymore... It's like bees are now so ashamed they are wingless that they'd rather forget they ever had them..."
A deep sigh came from the young woman's chest as she rose up and headed back to her clouds-making pots. Her thoughts went on, though "...and then they came up with this stupid explanation about the weight and the wing beat and shit, just to cover the big ugly disaster that the coalition with the Ant Imperrium brought. Yeah, yeah, nobody will ever forget that, no matter how hard the government will try to mask it behind revolutionary theories. They've really blown it with the experiment and that's the whole truth. Bees will never be able to fly. Never again."


Comments: 11
Anyway, this is a very good story. A lot of imagery and concepts.
A interesting parable. Personally, I don't think you need the last paragraph. I get it was an excuse, not an explanation.
True Karl, the last paragraph turns it into something else completely. I really don't need it, yet I'm keeping it since this is kind'a like my child, you know. I'm loving it with all its goods and bads.
Thank you all for stopping by!
Very fresh and great imagination. Thanks Glory.