Was it a butterfly or a plant? The little girl was uncertain and it occurred to her perhaps the butterfly/plant didn’t know either. The leaves or wings fluttered a little. She crouched down to look closer. “Which are you?”
“I’m not sure,” it answered, “but I very much like being both!”
The boy grabbed his sister’s shoulder and held her back. “Be careful! It’ll chomp you if you get too close!”
It had been a dry spring, but the morning dew still brought moisture to the forest. The tiniest of newborn fairies were nervous to fly up and catch themselves a dewdrop, so the nearby hazel cupped its leaves to capture the droplets for them. When they were full the leaves leaned down to let the fairy babies to sip their fill and grow up fat and fey.
He had set out to record the birth of spring, but soon he found an ancient being squinting back at him. “Don’t be so surprised,” it said, “spring has seen a million years or so, which hardly makes us young by any standard.”
The flower child yawned, her eyes closing against her will. Her head fell forward as sleep overtook her. She realized it at once and jerked herself awake. It lasted half a moment before she nodded off again. She began to fight it once more but her dreams began to whisper promises of wondrous things and tempted her to stay.
She pulled her hood lower as she stepped through the wood, willing no one to notice her there. “Think like a flower,” she told herself, and kept her head down.
Not every spider appreciated a web with a view as much as Penny did, but that didn’t matter to Penny. She hummed a happy tune as she spun her web, stopping now and then to have her spidery breath stolen away by the sight of the flower that sheltered her from rain.
His nose was to the ground, for he never could get past his awe of watching something grow out of the earth. And, oh, the wonders he saw! Yet through it all there was one he missed, for he never saw the beauty of his own self; never realized the wonder of his own fragile body as it grew up from the tiniest of seeds.
At long last the prophecy was coming true. All along the limbs of the wooden beasts they unfurled; the Eaters of Sunlight, Givers of Shade, and Echoes of Tranquility. Soon the forests would shiver with great green clouds of them holding back the sky and the long awaited summer would once again rule the land.
“What do you suppose is on the other side of that door?”
She thought it over. “May
be a wizard who can shrink down to any size, or a fairy taking a bath. I bet they like bubble baths. Or even a unicorn, polishing his hooves for a parade. Maybe even a goblin, making up some sort of mean potion to get back at the school bully.” She looked at her friend. “What do you think it is?”
Her friend blinked. “I was just thinking of cobwebs ‘n stuff.”
“Oh.”
Jennifer Shelby 