For the girl who lived under the stairs.

---

There was a girl once who loved picking flowers. She would run around the thickets and open fields and collect them. She liked how, despite the threat of drought and fire, defiant flowers still bloom. Sometimes, she would fall and skin her knees. Trip on tree roots and eat dirt. But she would never let go. As long as she held the flowers in her hand, they would never die.

After all this time picking flowers, the collection had become quite the bouquet. By now, the colorful arrangement had become the talk of the town. The locals would even come to her to ask for help in naming their newborns. She would, of course, suggest names like Daisy, Rose, or Tiger Lily.

Her brilliant, living treasure also attracted the attention of curious bees. They appreciated her gentle, yet steadfast grasp. Bumbling about, they’d touch down here and there on the cushion of soft petals. Their fuzzy bodies acting as vessels, ensuring the survival of many a species.

This particular day, as the girl stood in her favorite secluded field of wildflowers and the bees plopped to and fro between their favorite perennials in her hand, a different kind of buzzing was approaching. Nearer and nearer, a ferocious sound began to shake the very air around her. The frightened bees scattered. The terrible droning grew unbearable. She took a few steps back, unable to identify the threat.

Shielding her eyes from the midday sun, the girl could make out dark shapes in the sky coming toward her. A wind gust carried the putrid scent of smoke coming from the direction of her village. The distance was too great to know for sure, but was that shouting she heard? Was someone yelling her name?

Monstrous wasps, unlike any she had seen before, suddenly began landing in the field. Crushing the wildflowers with huge black bodies. Tearing roots from the earth in a stomping frenzy.

The girl was immobilized, seeing the things she loved most trampled and ripped apart in front of her. A fearful shriek from above woke her up from her daze. More were coming. She realized how vulnerable she was in the open field and dashed for the treeline.

The swishing flowers in her clenched fist, once bright with sunshine, darkened. Through tall grass, the shadows chased her. A glance over her shoulder revealed a pursuing horde of massive, black wasps. She sprinted faster now, careful to not let the flowers lose a single petal.

Just as she neared the safety of the trees, a wasp the size of a boulder zipped by her head. Missing its target, the insect slammed into a cedar tree and exploded in a splash of green blood. The girl ducked just in time to avoid the stinger of a second attacker, who with a thunk, got its abdomen stuck in a tree trunk. 

A second squadron of wasps formed up above the treetops and began a run of relentless dive bombing. Sleek, black bodies crashed down from above, each one wielding a stinger dripping with venom. Cut off and outmatched, the only path of escape was an ancient glacial trail. The girl zig-zagged through the onslaught of kamikaze hornets and weaved her way downhill.

Vaulting over rocks and roots, she followed the pathway, hoping it led to salvation. And with heaving breaths, she knew she needed to find it soon. Capitalizing on her fatigue, one of the swifter wasps overtook her. It landed a dozen paces in front of her, blocking the escape route. Its giant optics eyeing her with smug underestimation.

The clever girl lifted one end of a nearby discarded branch and snapped it in half with her foot. She rushed her enemy and jabbed the crude spear into the wasp’s eye. Oozing green liquid and shrieking, it batted frantically at its face with its antennae. 

She shook herself and her flowers clean of the green splatter. The dying screams and the scent of blood would attract the others. If she wanted to survive, she must keep going.

The ground under her adrenaline fueled legs became softer, then muddy. She slowed her pace, but not in time. Sliding down the hillside in slick mud required her every effort to maintain enough balance to not go head over heels. She took the same downward path of the heavy rains from the previous day, ending in knee deep sludge on the bank of a swamp.

The water before her smelled rancid. The mud sucking her legs to the ground smelled worse. Nearly immobilized, she strained against the pull of the wet earth, losing both shoes in the process. Then the dreadful droning returned.

A bomber unit of a dozen hornets dropped their payloads of sharp, moss covered stones. They fell through the air like a volley of colossal arrowheads, promising death from above. The stones embedded themselves deep into the mud around her, one grazing her flower wielding arm.

Amid the chaos, there was a favorable development. The girl was able to use the spent ammunition to hoist herself free of the muck. Careful to avoid the sharp edges with her bare feet, she hopped across the stones toward the reeking bog.

The squadron looped back around for another bombing run. They thought their target was cornered. But she could do what they can’t. Without missing a step and without a second thought, the girl plunged into the stagnate water, flowers and all. The wasps angrily released their second attack anyway, sending the pointed rocks splashing into the water.

But the girl was an adept swimmer and had already made underwater passage to a forest of lily pads a great distance away. She surfaced underneath one in the middle of them all, a domed refuge pressed to the top of her head.

She held her treasure of many living colors in front of her face, as if it were a flickering flame in the dead of night. The flowers were wet and drooping, but not drowned. She was their caretaker, entrusted with their survival. She would not fail them. They only needed a healthy dose of sunlight to be restored to the glory they were created with. 

At the moment, however, she was pinned down with a false sense of safety. Like a child hiding from monsters underneath the covers. She knew she couldn’t stay here forever. But to where could she run? The town was miles away, no one knew where she was, and on the other side of the swamp lay a dense, impenetrable forest. 

Hornets hummed and hissed above the field of lily pads as they searched for the girl. They were patient enemies and she was running out of strength and oxygen. 

Trapped in indecision, her anxiousness suggested it would be easier to tread water with both her hands free. The girl shook her head to clear the foggy thoughts. The waterlogged blossoms may as well have been a dispensable batch of weeds if she were to lose them now. She didn’t come this far to feed her treasure to the murky depths.

Maybe it was the dwindling air supply. Maybe it was a simple act of desperation. Maybe it was the fact all she had eaten today was crackers and ice cream. Some would come to call it bravery, while others called it stupidity, but nevertheless, the girl burst from her hiding place and summited the largest lily pad. 

Standing atop the six foot wide floating platform, she decided to take her chances in hand to stinger combat. 

“I’ll rip off your wings and beat you with them, you overgrown worms!” she yelled at the sky.

The hovering squadron of wasps hesitated at her boldness. Then after a moment, the formation separated and out from their midst descended a wasp thrice the size of the others. Its hairy body was jet black, save for a thick ring of yellow around its head, resembling a crown. 

“You’re just another bug to me,” the girl said, though her voice had lost its edge.

With graceful deception, the wasp king touched down before her, wobbling the now barely buoyant lily pad. The girl tipped to one side to keep from toppling over. That was the exact movement her adversary knew his weight would trigger. As he bolted forward in a blur, the girl realized she had made a terrible mistake. He pounced atop her, using his six legs to restrain her in place. She struggled under the pressure to no avail.

The wasp king’s four transparent wings began to beat rhythmically downward, slowly submerging his victim. She was held for a time under a foot of swamp water, unable to move, unable to breathe. He eased up and the lily bounced back to the surface.

The girl sputtered and choked on the foul water that had rushed over her. She lifted her head to shake the water out of her ears, only to be met by snapping mandibles inches from her face.

The horde of minions circling above broke into a taunting frenzy, thoroughly enjoying the spectacle of their leader’s domination. Powerless to do anything else, the girl roared back at the black mass holding her down. The wasp ruler didn’t appreciate the defiance, especially when it interrupted his triumphant gloating.

She glared hard into the several eyes on either side his wide head, resilient to the end. With dismissal, he turned his attention to the assemblage of flowers still in her grasp and intensified the pressure on her wrist with his foreleg. He didn’t seek the girl, but what she possessed.

Noticing the resolve in her expression and the tightening grip of her unnaturally strong hand, the wasp king deployed the stinger he rarely needed to use. The girl looked below his abdomen at the venom-dipped dagger. Her sweat mixed with the swamp water on her forehead.

The giant insect repositioned over her outstretched arm. She desperately clung to the flowers like a lifeline of fading hope. She still had them and they still had her. But the wasp king was sent here to make her let go.

He raised up slightly like drawing in a large breath of air before ruthlessly lunging forward. With surgical precision, the stinger punctured her forearm and sliced all the way down to her wrist.

Green venom mixed with the red of her blood. Everything seemed to slow. Her own scream sounded distant and muffled with the liquid still stuck in her ears from being waterboarded. The toxins being injected into her body set her arm on fire. Throat contracted in pain, vision blurry, heart rate increasing.

The girl’s conscience felt disconnected from the whole experience. Like the trauma triggered some kind of fail-safe that would protect her essence, so she might have a chance to later recover. Like some primal part of her ensured that no evil could touch who she truly was.

“This must be what it feels like to die.” Her own mouth said it, but the words felt a million miles away. Like the moon orbiting the planet, watching as the earth burns.

The girl blinked. On the other side of the poison IV jabbed into her arm, her bloody fist was clenched in a death grip. Despite her unyielding iron will, she knew it was only a matter of time before the noxious substance would reach her heart. Then would all be lost.

Satisfied with his work, the wasp king withdrew to his airborne army to torturously watch her bleed out. He would return for his trophy when her body released her soul, and its treasure. 

The flower wielder closed her eyes. She was drained of strength, veins infected with potent venom. Her bloodstream betrayed her, unknowingly transporting her demise. A mental check of her vitals reported things were not going to end well.

Shadows of the winged demons passed over her eyelids for a while. Then a great darkness settled over her and the light was no more. She felt weightless, as if she were being carried through the air. Perhaps her last breath was propelling her to the afterlife on one last journey.

But then it began to rain, the drip drops furrowing her brow. Confused and dazed from the blood loss, she opened her eyes. The ground was passing by far below her. She was indeed flying through the sky.

The girl couldn’t say for sure since her senses were dulled by the pain throbbing through her body, but she thought she could make out a splattering of dead bodies outlined in green puddles, dotting the ground around the swamp land.

A brief moment of self awareness caused her to look around. In front of her, held by two massive legs, was the decapitated remains of the wasp king. As her fatigued and poison-impaired brain tried to process what exactly was happening, those same two powerful legs ripped apart the wasp’s thorax from its abdomen with a satisfying crunch. Her glazed eyes watched as the dissected body parts fell unceremoniously and landed with a great splash in the putrid water below.

Realization blossomed in her mind. She wasn’t a soul soaring her way to heaven. In fact, she had escaped death entirely. What’s more, she was rescued by a four-winged, six-legged, dragon-sized dragonfly! 

Raindrops streaked down her face as the girl gave an exuberant shout of joy. Even the flowers seemed to smile and sigh with relief. But the day’s events caught up with her in a rush and she began to go as limp as her mangled arm.

The great dragonfly held the girl securely as he angled his shimmering body towards the remote, tangled forest below. He knew the place to take her, a refuge to heal her wounds. He knew who to send to care for her.

As he set the sleeping girl in the warm shelter of a hollow oak tree, he resisted the urge to wake her. He wished to tell her things. Things like, “It’s ok if healing hurts more than the wound itself. Cultivating something beautiful is worth the pain. Seeds take root in scarred soil. Care for them quietly, like the sun and the rain. And watch what can come forth from the hidden, dark earth. I promise it’s worth it. That’s where you came from. And you were worth it.”

---

A whispered wind from the west filled the gaps between the trees, carrying a swallow’s song. The late morning sun angled through the opening of the hollowed oak, and high above the forest floor, on a bed of leaves, awoke a girl.

Trampled by the previous day’s events, she didn’t move at first but lied still for a while, blinking. The smell of fresh wildflowers filled her nose. Still held securely, her eyes came into focus on the cluster of hues – reds, purples, and impossible blues. She breathed deep. They were alive, and somehow, she was too.

Slowly rising to her feet, she took in her surroundings. The small, sun-lit, cylindrical room was wide enough for her to do one cartwheel inside without falling out of the tree to her death, 80 feet below. The roof was tall enough she could stand on her own shoulders four times without hitting her head. 

She twirled around a couple times with appreciation, leaves falling out of her hair from her sleep and crunching underneath her bare feet. She stopped herself short of dizziness in order to safely peer over the edge from her elevated quarters. 

The forest was just waking up. Far down below, the girl could make out its scurrying, fluffy inhabitants. Squirrel’s quarrelsome bickering and chatter contrasted with the sweet birdsong that seemed to come from everywhere. Whatever happened the day before, life still finds a reason or two to keep living.

She felt a tingle in her arm and looked down to inspect the wound gifted from the deceased wasp king. To her amazement, the stems of each flower had twisted around her hand, snaked down her wrist, and become grafted into the gash on the inside of her forearm. The flowers, once rooted in earth, found a new source in flesh, her pulse pumping life into them.

For a few moments, she was suspended in wonder, not knowing how or why this was happening. 

“Behold! My female flora!” the girl shouted to the forest, waving her arm out the tree’s opening, her raised hand like a torch. But the creatures below and above were too preoccupied with their own trivialities, not paying much attention to the yelling human.

She lowered her arm, disappointed they were unimpressed with her newfound peculiarity. Though it was but a tiny letdown that no one cared or noticed her, the slight rejection popped the wonder bubble she had temporarily been suspended in.

Reluctantly, she acknowledged gravity again. It felt heavier now. The girl took a deep breath, but even her lungs struggled underneath some unseen weight. 

She thought of yesterday’s brutality, the unprovoked terror, and took a couple of steps back from the outside world before her. Only one morning ago, the girl blissfully sang and picked wildflowers in a field that had no idea it was about to be pillaged and burned. Everything is so brittle. 

She remembered how powerless she felt, held underwater by the black mass atop her. She clenched her fist. The furious jeers of the swarm above. Her knuckles turned white. The slash of the stinger and the burn of the venom. Her arms began to shake.

The girl retreated further away from the sunlight and the waking world beyond, until she backed into the wall on the dark side of the room. Gritting her teeth, she closed her eyes and slid down to the floor. Hot, angry tears came out. Irreplaceable beauty was destroyed forever, right in front of her. And she just watched it happen. 

One would guess this was happening in other places too – different evils taking shape to let people know nowhere is safe. Oh, how she wished she could breathe fire and burn them out of existence. Destroy them all. The dragonfly had slaughtered her enemies. Why shouldn’t she do the same?

Opening her eyes, the girl should have been repulsed by the flower’s transformation, but the dark thoughts that had swept in like a plague.

Thorns started to grow out of the stems. Brownish, sticky mucilage coated their colors. Some turned into mouths with fangs, jaws wide open. Angled leaves with knife-blade edges, claws, pincers, bristles, pitchers with pitfall traps. Bladderworts replaced bluebells. Snakeroot replaced snapdragons. A grove of hemlock instead of foxglove.

With these weaponized sprouts, she could launch a carnivorous counterattack against wickedness everywhere. She gritted her teeth and focused her anger. She would defend the brittle and the beautiful. Build high walls around the open ranges, arm them with towers and catapults.

Maybe she could use her newfound powers to teach the flowering plants to sharpen themselves and fight. Dark laughter spilled out of her, as she pictured daisies with slingshots and daffodils with brass knuckles.

The girl fantasized about the elegant execution of her foes. Vines whipping about, grabbing wasps out of the sky. Their dying screams as the life is strangled out of them. The creatures of the forest might join the fight and aid the plant life. She could equip the natural world with grass blade scythes and sabers. They wouldn’t have to fear another attack. Maybe they’d even take the offensive, find the wasp nest, and launch a full-scale invasion.

A familiar buzzing at the doorway snapped the girl out of her dark imaginings. She used the momentum of her developing insurgency and got up into a battle stance. Centering her attention on some grim and doomful thoughts, she conjured a mace of organics from her arm and began to swing it in circles. 

“Come on, you bug-eyed bastards,” the girl said, crouching lower in preparation of the assailants. 

But what emerged from beyond the tree hole was no illegitimate child. For it was the face of a baby bumble bee that peeked around the corner of the opening.

Feeling rather foolish, the girl disarmed herself and replaced her spiky moss ball with something more welcoming. Peering into the hollow, the little bee saw the large, fresh flowers and gave a buzz of delight. 

Though still a youngster, the bee was nearly palm-sized. He meandered towards her in twisting loops, still trying to figure out how his wings worked. Landing gently on the plump, purple petals of a violet, he tumbled towards its center and splashed in a cloud of pollen.

The baby bee scrambled to his feet, slightly alarmed at the commotion he made. Yellow dust floated down around him, tickling the little bee’s nose in such a way he gave a sneeze that shot him right out of the tree trunk. He left behind a thin trail of pollen, shimmering like fairy dust. 

“Silly, Billy,” the girl said. The name seemed appropriate, given their brief encounter. 

The violet receded back inside her, sealed away behind the locked cage of the gruesome laceration. She flexed the fingers of her empty hand. The vacancy felt strange.

Reentering the chamber, Billy bumble bee lilted over to her unsteadily and landed on her bare, injured arm. 

“Hey, be careful!”

Giving her an odd, apologetic look, Billy looked down and threw up on her wound. A golden, glistening glob of sparkling honey. 

“What the hell! I thought we were friends?” 

The girl shook the bee off her, but the syrupy liquid remained. In fact, it soothed much of the nagging pain and half of her temper. The resin rested over the incision like a warm bandage.

Billy looped around and flew back to her, wondering if the girl would swat him out of the air. Instead, she held out her hand as a platform for him to land on. He tentatively set his fuzzy body down, his heat filling up her palm.

The girl wiped a dribble of honey from the corner of his mouth and said, “Thank you.”

Although Billy’s understanding of English was nonexistent, his instincts interpreted her soft facial expression as one of approval. He trotted a happy circle, as the girl held him aloft. He knew the healing properties of honey and would gladly puke on her again if the need arose.

“Here, before you go.” A red clover blossom appeared from her hand. “A small token of my gratitude.” She pinned the stem to his woolly chest, which he wore proudly like a medal of valor.

The girl watched as the baby bumble bee fired up his wings and zipped out of the tree like his work for the day was just beginning. His absence left behind a certain glow of providence in a new place in her heart. Like even way out here in an uninhabited forest, way up here in a hole in a tree, someone cared an awful lot about her and would set things straight when she lost her way.

A gracious smile bloomed across her face before emotion welled up and turned the smile to tears, snaking down the contour of her nose. How could something so vulnerable and innocent like a flower, like a baby bee, coexist with such merciless evil, like a horde of ravaging wasps?

She should count herself lucky, she thought, sniffing softly. Not everyone had a dragonfly guardian to save them. The girl considered letting the darkness back in, to take revenge, to strike out. But she wouldn’t let something beautiful become twisted and sharp. The rich soil of her hands was made for something greater, something more powerful than violence.

Part of her wanted to hide away in her treetop safe house forever. To never engage the world again, to never be hurt by it. Part of her wanted to weaponize the defenseless. To make weak things strong through biological warfare. To destroy everything that had a menacing stinger. The poison of her past threatened to choke out the present and make her watch as the future turned against her. She would not allow it.

The girl roused herself from the leaf covered floor, rustling her way to the edge of the hollow. To the edge of everything she’s never been before. The expansive, tangled forest was a crossroads. The familiarity of self interwoven with the uncharted unknown.

Uncertainty, has a way of uncovering interdependence. Like pulling back the topsoil to reveal a hidden root system, pulsing with an intelligence secretly holding everything together. Like the webbed pattern of the magnificent, membranous wings of the one who rescued her. She imagined looking into his prismatic dragonfly eyes and saw herself reflected in a thousand different shades. All of them wonderful.

“Some gardens only bloom under the moon.” 

The thought appeared, like a distant friend arriving unexpectedly. This memory-like idea, brought to life a glorious moonflower. It arose sticky, emerging through the honey covering her arm.

The girl imagined moths landing on the white, night-blooming petals. Even in the dark, there were nocturnal pollinators to care for them while the sun was away.

“I will not reap destruction, but a harvest,” the girl promised herself.

The moonflower withdrew and she palmed the seeds her thoughts produced. A handful of seeds can build an army or a sanctuary. She will not use the same tactics as a servant of darkness. She will show them again and again, no matter what you heap on us, we will grow through anything. 

Some of the seeds grew light, feathery tops. The girl tossed them into the open air, and watched them catch the breeze. To other seeds she gave wings, who readily helicoptered into the wind. The longer these feathers and wings keep the wind under them, the further they can go. The wider they can spread their offspring.

She made mushrooms pop up along the lines of her fingers. They chugged out spores like a steam engine, sending their near invisible genetic material airborne. Damp, mossy logs awaited their arrival. 

Seeds and spores, they are the remedy. They are the life that is lived tomorrow. Without them, it is the end of a species. The end of the organic beautiful and the rise of a mechanical existence. Redemption has orders to work its way into the soul of the earth and let something impossible sprout and grow there. 

These future blooms will carry out those orders. A creative work to perpetuate the beautiful place they came from by being who they already are. Beauty is their lifeline, their connection to eternity – to the past and to the future. And that is something worth living for.

Perched in her lookout, her watchtower over the land, the girl held onto the stem of a giant dandelion seed. With the feathery tuft of fuzz spread above her head, she planned on riding a swift current of air down to the ground.

But hesitation stalled her on the edge of the tall oak. A queasy sensation weaseled into her guts. She imagined leaping into an unkind wind, slamming into a branch, losing her grip, and plummeting to her death.

The girl took a moment to reconsider her plan and let the nausea subside. The delay provided ample time for the return of a baby bombus impatiens.

Bee-lining straight for her, it seemed he was coming along quite nicely in gaining operative control over his wings.

“Billy! You’re back! And with gifts!” For Billy carried in his mouth a little spider, dangling from a string of web. Overly pleased with himself, he came up to her like a dog trotting up to its owner with a rabbit. 

Billy swung the spider around, playing keep away, refusing to let it go. The small arachnid wasn’t scrambling away, almost as if it was enjoying the teetering and tottering. 

“Billy, you brilliant baby! That gives me an idea,” the girl said. 

Fortified with inspired ingenuity, she tossed aside the dandelion seed aircraft over the platform’s edge. To which it was immediately hijacked by a wind gust and exploded into a hundred feathery seeds against a nearby oak.

Confident in her revised method of traversal, the girl held up her arm and aimed it at a neighboring tree. A thick vine shot out and attached to a sturdy branch.

Sensing the high anticipation, Billy buzzed over and landed on her shoulder. He gave the girl a jolly wiggle of warm assurance. The spider had swung up onto the bumble bee’s head, stationed between his two antennae like a hairpiece. 

“I don’t know if any of us is ready for this,” the girl said to her companions. “But I’m convinced something has lain dormant for a long time.” She looked through her wound to the creative life pulsing through her veins. “And I think it is time we wake it up.”

She leaped out into the open air and swung on the vine, landing securely on a branch below where it was anchored. Detaching the first, she shot out another vine, swinging again above the forest floor.

Through the rushing wind, her compadres stayed with her. Billy went a little cross-eyed as his baby bumble bee brain tried to keep up with the blurring motions. While the spider atop his head could easily detect every leaf flashing by.

Out of breath from the exhilaration, the girl perched from a new vantage point. It was quite exciting to get a new perspective with every swing. As she took a moment’s rest, a huge shadow passed by overhead and dropped a truth into her lap. Like a sun-kissed dewdrop. She closed her eyes to savor the sweetness – our world is changed by what we create.

Going forth into the darkness of the unknown is a journey all must take. Some cover their eyes and pretend it isn’t happening, but blindness does not negate danger. It won’t keep you safe.

The girl could see clearly now, eyes wide open. Not as things are, but as they could be. The future she was catapulting into was the one she was actively creating. And she made sure everyone she met along the way left wearing a crown of flowers.

Her legacy will be a scattering of seeds everywhere she goes. In her wake, rippling out further than she will ever know, the girl will leave an earth filled with color.

(photo by Aksultan Zhumanov)