M E L I T A
Perhaps the girl should’ve been alarmed by an approaching stranger; her instincts were on alert, Fangorn had long since heard the snap of twigs and brambles, boughs pushed aside to make way for another, but her gaze simply flickered over to the incoming woman, then back to the bees, thoroughly enamored.
But then the other one is too, and she was forced to become riveted back upon the latest arrival. She didn’t recognize her, not really, but Melita had always been one who concentrated more on actions instead of faces – she might’ve been there all along, but the child was too distracted, too deterred by everything else in nature, in violence, in vitriol, to pay much attention. The woman was visibly pregnant, belly rounded in an evident, future babe; so the girl smiled, a bright, ebullient grin bounding across her face, friendly and amiable, not afraid or burdened by the notion of ominous upheavals.
“No,” she was forced to admit; an avid observer of bees in her childhood, she’d always hummed at them, near them, beside them, listening to the beat and drone of their wings, following their bounding forms until they returned to their hive, pretending to flutter and weave like them across waves of grass and wild, wondrous meadows; untamed and free. But they’d never constructed their own melodies, sonnets, and songs, never reprised refrain after refrain, and it was lovely, just to hear their mellifluous power. Perhaps all the animals here had more to offer than any other; her gaze shifted to Fangorn for a moment, then back up to the bees, to the stranger, to the strains and arias floating around them, serene, tranquil, a moment of repose. “But they’re wonderful.”
She sighed, then shifted towards the other, rising from her crouch on logs and brush, extending a hand to shake. “I’m Melita.”
