The Lord of the Bees
is what William Golding should have entitled a sequel to his classic, middle-school saturated, reading list entry, The Lord of the Flies. This "sequel" lays things down in a more psychological manner... it says, here are the seedlings for a viscous dictatorship spawned by anarchy, right on your local elementary school's playground.
Why bees? Well, you need to make-up for the lost chaos effect of being stranded. Bees are much more ominous than flies (on a playground anyway).
Another reason: tell me whether you would start questioning the freakiness of the fact that at least 7 bee stings among eighty kids occurred within an hour's time, on my son's playground today.
The day was weird all over. I won't go into it all now, but let's just say that a full moon, the last day of school and an uncharacteristically un-hot day combined with bad news phone calls made for a less than throw your backpacks in the air... and let's not forget the car backing into the bus in the parking lot as the kids are boarding to go home. "This is not my beautiful last day of school", the older ones must have thought, "only adults could ruin this day..."
Perhaps things would have run better if the kids were in charge. So go ahead, cut to clusters of faux gangs stomping out the spawn of some odd orange-egg producing insect, chase scenes, skinned knees, children coming back from the office with ice bags on their bee stings, genocide on the daddy-long-legs, and the arguments: "such and such said that I was married to such and such" "such and such won't play with me" "there's no soft spot for me to rest". Tell me little one, would you complain to your self-proclaimed child leader? Would you dare approach the King Kid who wears a crown of knotted praying mantises? I believe you would not.
On the last day, perhaps the children would rule in what they believe would be a candy-filled better place. This would last about three minutes at which when was over would be interrupted by hair-pulling and kicking each other in a frenzy to obtain all the red ones.
Why bees? Well, you need to make-up for the lost chaos effect of being stranded. Bees are much more ominous than flies (on a playground anyway).
Another reason: tell me whether you would start questioning the freakiness of the fact that at least 7 bee stings among eighty kids occurred within an hour's time, on my son's playground today.
The day was weird all over. I won't go into it all now, but let's just say that a full moon, the last day of school and an uncharacteristically un-hot day combined with bad news phone calls made for a less than throw your backpacks in the air... and let's not forget the car backing into the bus in the parking lot as the kids are boarding to go home. "This is not my beautiful last day of school", the older ones must have thought, "only adults could ruin this day..."
Perhaps things would have run better if the kids were in charge. So go ahead, cut to clusters of faux gangs stomping out the spawn of some odd orange-egg producing insect, chase scenes, skinned knees, children coming back from the office with ice bags on their bee stings, genocide on the daddy-long-legs, and the arguments: "such and such said that I was married to such and such" "such and such won't play with me" "there's no soft spot for me to rest". Tell me little one, would you complain to your self-proclaimed child leader? Would you dare approach the King Kid who wears a crown of knotted praying mantises? I believe you would not.
On the last day, perhaps the children would rule in what they believe would be a candy-filled better place. This would last about three minutes at which when was over would be interrupted by hair-pulling and kicking each other in a frenzy to obtain all the red ones.
posted by Clarissa @ 8:17 PM
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