Nectar of the gods

 Nectar of the gods

 

 This was my story for a Flash Fiction contest in June.

These were the story criteria:

Each story had to include (word for word) the following SEVEN descriptions at any point in the story body and be 500 word or fewer:

1. THICK AS HONEY
2. SILENT AND STILL
3. GOLDEN GLOW
4. HEART-SHAPED
5. DELICATE PERFUME
6. SOFT AND DOUGHY
7. RAZOR-SHARP 

Nectar of the gods

Alice Gray was seventy-three and had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. They had given her less than a year to live. She did not take this news well, having been an explorer all her life and beaten death several times over. She’d kept an ace up her sleeve just for this.

This is how she came to be in the heart of the forest, the foliage was so thick that the golden glow from the noonday sun only let through dappled patches of sunlight. Her quest was to find the elusive giant honeysuckle. Deep in this ancient forest was where it was supposed to grow. She was roughly in the center of the woods if she could rely on her GPS, it was having problems connecting to the satellites. She’d made it past the bogs that were soft and doughy and would suck you down without warning, never to be seen again. If she didn’t find it soon, she would have to make camp and this idea did not appeal to her in the least.

Up ahead she noticed a lightening in the perpetual gloom of the forest. It was a small clearing that hadn’t shown up during her aerial reconnaissance. There in the middle of the clearing was a towering oak tree. About half way up the tree was a heart-shaped knot hole. As she stepped into the clearing everything went silent and still. She felt like she had crossed the border into another time and place. Almost at the same instant she smelled the delicate perfume of the honeysuckle. There were vines of it as thick as your arm winding around the oak tree and disappearing into the heights. She could see the flowers dripping their nectar as thick as honey. That was what she was here for. The nectar was purported to cure all know diseases, return youth and even imbue immortality upon who ever tasted it.

What stood between her and her goal was a wall of brambles with razor-sharp thorns. She’d not come all this way to be thwarted by a thorn bush. Using the climbing gear she’d brought with her, she went about thirty feet up in a tree closest to the oak. She shot a barbed spike with a steel cable attached to it into the trunk of the oak. Then she ratcheted down here end until it was taut. With her zip line in place she made her way to the oak keeping her speed down so as not to crash into it. She reached up an pulled one of the honeysuckle flowers toward her. As the nectar dripped into her mouth the only word she could think of to describe it was ambrosia. Looking at her hands she saw the age spots disappearing and felt a vigor that she didn’t remember having for years. She took samples of the nectar, set a way point in her GPS and headed home for her next adventure.