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The clearing was cloaked in a fine vertical sheet of rain: the kind of rain that was almost imperceptible to the naked eye, appearing only as light static against the deep green of the summer foliage. Gentle as the precipitation was, it had been relentless for hours, and the ground was soggy with it. The grass squelched beneath Brax's hooves, and in the mossier areas almost seemed to undulate like water beneath his weight. The young stallion had been swiftly soaked to the bone while grazing the sweet new clover, and driven from the open to wait the rain out from below the boughs of a huge, lightning-blasted sycamore.
Perhaps a more determined horse would not have let a little rain disturb their evening meal, but Abraxas had always found it made his coat itchy. Yet how his mother had cooed over the color his coat turned when wet. Dry, it was a light champagney gold: beautiful but understated. Wet, it shone like deep polished bronze, and his mother always said it brought out the green in his hazel eyes. "I would rather be dry than beautiful," a very young Abraxas had once remarked.
"Well, too bad for you, because you're always beautiful," his mother had predictably countered with a laugh.
"But I don't WANT to be beautiful," Abraxas had retorted.
"Sorry — handsome. You're handsome, of course."
"I don't want to be handsome either!" Abraxas wailed.
"Well, then what do you want to be?"
Abraxas could still remember the glimmer of bemused confusion in his mother's eyes, and how it had stoked a deep, childish rage in him that he would not understand for some time.
"I just want to be ME."
Now the memory only brought the gentle lopsided curve of a smile to Brax's freckled grey lips, but this was fleeting, as the memory of his mother brought with it a stab of homesickness. Brax was a grown stallion now — still lean and a little leggy, lacking the musculature he would grow into in his prime — and though only two years of age, those innocent memories felt as far away as they ever would be. With adulthood came the ache of knowledge and doubt: understanding of how he had come to be where he was, both physically and metaphorically, yet fear of what was to come, and what he had yet to learn. There was still much of that, to be sure.
Meanwhile, a bright cluster of foxgloves, ranging in color from bright fuschia to pallid white, swayed in a gentle breeze, and a lone bumblebee braved the rain to sneak pollen from their truncular blooms. Abraxas watched the insect with passive interest. There must have been a strange kind of freedom in being a bumblebee: to be a creature of purpose only, without the faculties for complex thought or emotion, perhaps hardly any awareness at all. It did not ever wonder where to go or what to do; it did not suffer from love or loss. It did not have identity crises. It simply was.
Oh, to be a bumblebee.