ursa

"He squinted, trying to thread a bead onto a thin, barely visible, translucent string — just long enough to wrap gently around a girl’s slender wrist.

One by one.

Some were red, like shame.

Some green, like envy.

Yellow, like cowardice.

The fields bloomed white — six- or seven-petaled flowers scattered across the forest carpet of dry leaves and pine needles, awakened from their sleep by the first days of spring. There were so many of them — hundreds, probably. David stopped counting after sixty.

They had to hurry: to grow, to reproduce, to spread — racing to take over the forest floor before the trees unfurled their thick crowns of leaves, plunging everything below into shadow. By that time, the anemones would already be ready to wither away — only to return the next year, at the very same time, with even more determination and strength.