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of sweet, liquid warmth through her body. In it she could almost perceive the brilliant wildflowers and their bursts of color, the honeycomb, the bees she’d read about who’d tirelessly carried pollen back to their hives. Was this like dipping her toes into the Sea of Japan? Was this golden taste of yesteryear something she was… missing?
Samerah found herself lost in the flames, unexpectedly saddened by the snow and ring and honey and the beautiful planet she would never truly know, scattered around her in a pile of photographs and ephemerae. In a fingertip of honey, she’d tasted the sweet mourning of this lost world, imperfect as it may have been. Tragedy, she thought for the first time. Part of it were a tragedy. And against the flickering light, she saw her great-grandmother as a young woman, leaning against an elephant in one of her photographs, a relic of that world, much like the bees, the snowflakes, the wedding ring: a delicate, disappearing species.