The Game of Sun Seeds — Behind the meadow stall, where cut stems squeaked in a pail and August smelled like warm grass, Tessa pressed a burnt twig to a flat sunflower center. Read the full story →
Behind the meadow stall, where cut stems squeaked in a pail and August smelled like warm grass, Tessa pressed a burnt twig to a flat sunflower center. She had invented a game called Sun Seeds: every bee that landed earned one tiny dot, and every dot had to curl around the last without bumping it. Easy? That is what she told the bees. Secretly, her wrist ached by dot number forty-two.
Then the wind nosed under the tablecloth. The tied bouquet rolled, bees zipped like striped arrows, and Tessa’s careful dots began to smudge. “Hold still, you golden giants,” she whispered. She looped ribbon around the stems, hugged the bunch with one elbow, and kept dotting—small, smaller, smallest—until the centers looked as if they were humming. The bees landed in turns, exactly along her curling trail, and the flowers tilted toward her game.
By supper, every sunflower in the stall had copied the pattern, as if seeds preferred a path made by hand. Ever since, sunflower centers keep their dotted spirals, and if you spot the bee near the lower bloom, you may be catching the next round of Sun Seeds.
