Wake up.

Oh, my God, you’re a bee. Why are you talking to me?

We read comment threads. We know when a little girl needs to have her mind and heart expanded.

I’m thirty years old.

As long as you hate and fear bees, you will be forever a child.

Okay.

Pardon?

Okay, that sounds good.

No, we’re proposing to shrink you down to bee-size, give you wings, and then fly together over field and dale. You will slowly learn about the fragile nature of our beautiful blue-green earth. About the gentle, misunderstood nature of your winged sisters and brothers.

That sounds like one of those Sophie’s World deals, to be honest, and I’m just not into it. Maybe it’s more Ishmael, which is even worse.

It will change your entire life; you will no longer be able to move through your day unaware of the thinly-woven fabric of interconnectedness in which we are all but tiny stitches.

I would prefer not.

If we were rabbits, would you take us up on the offer?

Almost certainly.

See, it’s hard for us not to take offense at that.

Did Richard Adams write anything transcendent about the inner life of the bee? Did I miss it?

You will be the Richard Adams of the bees. You will make us come alive for children.

Like “hey, kids, leave a glass of non-diet soda on the porch and wait twenty minutes”? For that, I don’t need to get out of bed.

Was it not Kahlil Gibran who said: “But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee. For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life, and to the flower a bee is a messenger of love, and to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy? People of Orphalese, be in your pleasures like the flowers and the bees.”

Am I back at Anglican summer camp, that we’re reading Gibran to each other? Or are we at a hippie wedding?

We offered you paradise. You would have experienced emotions a hundred times greater than what you call love. And a thousand times greater than what you call fun. You would have been treated like a god and lived forever in beauty. But, now, because of your distrustful nature, that can never be.

That’s just The Simpsons. You are just doing The Simpsons now.

Goodbye.

Wait, bee?

Yes?

(shoe flies through air, silence reigns)