![]() She spent most of June working on her latest catalogue. Now, though, Esther glowed with goodwill, grinding her bare feet into the grass to feel the dirt beneath, letting the bees whiz past her ears on their way to the pond and relishing the thrill that came from the little daggers passing her by, leaving her unharmed in their wake. Her friends were terrible her teachers, monsters. School was a joke, all online, unreal and indelible as a nightmare. The curtains in her room, billowing with the morning breeze the spongy hills leading down to the hives the bees themselves, round and busy as May became June. ![]() Those were the days when she was in love with everything. Amelia GrayĮsther was sixteen the summer that all the bees in her father’s hives died. But experiments aside, the protagonist’s earnest attention to the world around her is what kept my attention and stuck in my memory-that, and an ending which would absolutely meet the qualifications for Esther’s carnal taxonomy. I love a story which doubles as a bit of a science experiment, backing up claims with evidence as this does, while moving deftly through a good story. “Birds x Bees” is a sharply rendered story of a teenager’s speculative curiosity at sixteen, the most painful of ages, not dissimilar to a hundred bee stings down one’s forearm. ![]() Katharine Duckett’s “Birds x Bees” is one of three winners of the 2022 CRAFT Amelia Gray 2K Contest, guest judged by Amelia Gray. ![]()
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