As they sat watching, grandmother in straw hat and grandchild with her plastic magic wand, a bee flew up close to the plant. It buzzed about the pollen, dizzying itself with the scent, until quite clumsily it made a drunken spiral downwards and set itself upon a petal. With its tiny legs it then crawled towards the stamen.

“But won’t the…” Abigail began.

“Ssh,” her grandmother whispered gently, crouching down to her height and placing her hands upon the child’s shoulders. Then she pointed to the flower. “Watch,” she whispered sweetly. Abigail watched obediently, and drew the wand closer to her chest, clutching it tightly with both hands.

The bee had only tottered a few millimetres towards the sticky green stalk, when it slipped, toppled, and cascaded down its gullet. Abigail instantly ran forward, slipping from her grandmother’s gentle grasp, as the old woman laughed and clapped her hands together in apparent joy. The little girl leaned closer to the base of the plant. From the rays of the sun cast into its funnel she could make out the shadow of the bee as its silhouette writhed and sprawled, drowning in the sickly nectar, its coarse feet making a slight scraping noise against the waxy interior of the pink flesh. Her grandmother joined her by her side, and watched the slow silhouette of the insect’s death.

“It’s dying!” the girl exclaimed in horror. “The flower is killing it!”

“Yes,” her grandmother smiled, transfixed by the shadows.

“But it was so beautiful. Why would it be so wicked?” Her grandmother turned to the child.

“Oh Abigail, it’s not wicked. It’s just feeding. It has to feed to live. You did say it was beautiful, didn’t you?” The girl nodded slowly, her bottom lip in a firm pout. “Well, beautiful things have to do this to live. Everything in the world feeds on something else.” She stroked her grandaughter’s fine blonde hair, watching how it glistened in the sunlight. “You do understand don’t you?”

Abigail stared hard at the flower in front of her.

Suddenly it no longer looked anything like a flower at all. It looked like a mouth. A large hungry greedy mouth, swallowing everything and anything it could lie and cheat its way near to it, and not once feigning any expression beyond a pink indifferent yawn for every life that slid down its throat.

She looked down at the pink plastic toy she held in her hands, and then back at the flower. In a blur she raised the wand high above her head and brought it down hard upon the plant, ripping through its large petals and splintering its stem.

Her grandmother gasped.

Quickly the girl brought the wand to her left shoulder and let it fly out again against the base. The plant split with a sharp crack, the torn remains of its once ornate pink crown toppling from its severed perch to the lawn below in a theatrically languid droop. Sap oozed from the broken stem, the gooey snare dripping slowly down the stalk and seeping uselessly into the earth.