Bumbling About

I bumbled into a friend of mine who had nice little feet, and craving friendly company as I was, sat down to have a chat with him.

"You shouldn't let some little smelly moth tease you like she does," I advised him.

I spoke as if I hadn't been teased a least twice that week! "I know, but I'm frightened of standing up to her," my friend confessed with a sigh. It wasn’t like I could talk!

Just then we both smelled that his dreaded one was by, and turning we saw her soon enough.

"Hey, cutie," she sang to him, sounding like she was in a teasing mood.

He blushed, and I did too, even though she gave no indication she'd even noticed me. She flitted round to my friend, who was sitting meekly, and pushed her tight grey drapery right at him. This covered her so skimpily she made both of us catch our breath, and you could tell from her flat freckled face that she knew.

“It’s my body,” she reminded us smugly, as if reading our minds.

Unbelievably, she then alighted on both our laps to tease my friend’s stinger with her forefoot. Artfully and incessantly she pressed away. As she was on all sixes, this meant her butt was pushed carelessly in my face! How I yearned to shove her away. For she'd given me a prominent case of the stingers too, not least with her cheesy moth-smell that occupied my nostrils like a solid object.

I watched, though I tried not to, as each little touch upon my friend gave him more of what he wanted, but never enough. She was sweetly withholding what he was desperate for, which was to use his stinger at last. Making him want to, but not letting him. His eyes were closed and he was murmuring as if in a fever. I could only guess how painfully he going to ache afterwards.

Even so, I couldn't get rid of the feeling he was the lucky one. I was jealous of him for getting even that little. With every sniff of what was stuck in my face, that feeling grew sharper.

Finally I couldn't bear it anymore. "You know, I’ve got a stinger too," I hinted to her throatily.

But she just turned to look over her shoulder at me for a second, her dust-coloured hair lying on her freckly face, and smirked.

Still weak from that encounter, later the same day I spied a butterfly anyone would have wanted to net. Excitedly I started for her, stumbling, almost tripping over my own clumsy stinger. In my mind I was already sniffing her honey-pollen, so much sweeter than the moth-smell I'd already suffered through today.

She took to her toes at once, however, and not along the grass, but high-stepping it into the hot sky like the startled flutterer she was. I was left panting in the heat, flabbergasted.

It wasn't fair! No way was I fast enough in the air to go after her. It was aerodynamically impossible for me to fly as it was!

"Moths and butterflies are going tease you all the time," explained my classmate at the hive, a know-it-all girl-bee, when I asked her very evasively about what had happened to me that day. "You boys spend your lives longing to use your stingers, but you know you can't. So they love making you want to. It must drive you frantic!"

"Well, maybe I'll catch a butterfly or moth and sting her hard anyway," I grumbled, stupidly, but I was still in that sort of mood.

"Like you even could!" laughed the know-it-all. "They can fly without any effort, and you have to try really hard. Moths and butterflies totally know it too. You'll end up exhausted at the foot of some flower, and you'll never get to use your sting."