So in the interest of branching out from the E-Prime phrase challenge, I’m proposing a new game here where we do that thing where one person writes a couple of sentences, and then the next person, and so forth and so on and the story unfolds!
Here we go:
Her grandmother called her Hummingbird, and she liked her grandmother, so she kept the name. As a toddler Hummingbird would…
… sit for hours among the flowers in her mother’s patch of herbs, watching and listening for the bees, imitating their sound, until one day…
…she saw a deer wander through the garden and decided to follow. Before long she found herself lost in the forest near her home.
She didn’t feel all that lost however, for though the deer quickly outran her, pine giants and mossy-bearded gnomes captured her attention. They curmudgeonly tolerated her little hands as she raked through beds of duff and ate up ferns. Children always devour, but their hunger comes from a place of innocence. Approximately two anthills, sixteen brown mushrooms, several nutty-smelling millipedes, and one owl pellet later, Hummingbird noticed something exceptionally remarkable…
… in a dark niche under an old, gnarly oak root: a small silvery bell glistened in the late afternoon sun. Hummingbird stared at it for a while, unsure what to make of it. A mixture of fear and curiosity made her forget everything around her.
She HAD to eat it. She MUST. Everything beautiful and sparkly belonged in her mouth. With chubby hands still mushroom-stained and millipede-scented, she placed the bell on her tongue.
Turning it around in her mouth, feeling its cool, smooth surface, she turned it and examined it from all sides, lip to shoulder to crown until suddenly the little bell stuck to her tongue - and didn’t want to come off again!
Hummingbird made an effort to remove the bell from her tongue. She attempted to peel it off, but it remained firmly attached. Then she gave it a flick with her index finger. In concert with the finger making contact with the bell a loud and sonorous tolling of a seemingly much larger bell went off in the distance. When she swiveled her head to point in the direction which she suspected the other bell to be she saw a bright flash emit from the bell stuck to her tongue. Magic was afoot!