SSCS 01: Installment 5 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 5 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
The scout longs to rush homeward, to spread her stick-thin limbs and fly on the fastest wind that will take her. But on her long-long journey, she glimpsed a whisper of the bees. The barest fragment, and not ‘til she was at the very end of her strength, when homeward was the only place she was still able to go. But she must make sure that fragment is not lost. She must build the beacon, and hope that it is not too late to guide her sisters. A honey-thin thread of hope.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 5: 18.0727
To build a beacon, first, a stone is laid down beneath 17 grains of sand. This is the seating stone, and it can be any color or shape, but it must be as smooth as long touch can make it, whether scoured fine by a wind that has blown again and again over its hollow while the centuries pass and the wind and the stone speak in riddles that only the closeness of time has made into warmth; or the smooth of something held close and pressed and rubbed because it carries the comfort of a memory, or a promise, and is dear despite the stone façade. Or because of it.
And it is best if it is a small stone, for 17 grains of sand are not many, and it would not due to spoil the seating by allowing more to creep on unnoticed. The desert is a broad, wide beast, and it can be made to help if one is exacting and patient, but it does not want to and needs only the slightest shifting – maybe a briefly stronger wind – to shrug off that burden.
Once the seating stone is placed, and prepared, then it must be fixed beneath a fine layer of blood. This will be the heart of the beacon.