Dear God,

	I found a honey-bee today, dead on the ground. It lay there peacefully, quiet and still, staring at heaven. I asked my mom and she said that when the summer ends, bees are living on borrowed time. Their job is done and without a job, things in nature just go away. Honey bees are almost all girls. There are a few boys and they don’t do anything but eat honey and help the queen lay more eggs so there will be more bees to work again when the spring comes. 

They’re all girls and I found one dead on the ground under a cloudy sky. Her family doesn’t care. She died and left behind a mother and a bunch of sisters and maybe a father. She won’t be missed because they’re all dying. Her father wouldn’t have missed her anyway. He has too many daughters to notice. Her mother might miss her, but she’s pretty busy, too. Many of her daughters are dying nowadays. Who can notice just one when there are hundreds dying together?

Boy bees aren’t supposed to be so smart compared to other bees, so maybe her father wasn’t anything special; more like a pet than a dad. Maybe she didn’t know her dad at all. I don’t really know my dad, either. He wasn’t around for long after I was born and I have never talked to him, so he’s not really special to me. I ask my mom about him sometimes but she usually gets angry or really sad. I don’t know why she can’t just talk about him, but she can’t.

Today, I found a honey-bee on the sidewalk and she was dead and didn’t have a dad and she never made her mom angry or sad. Mom dates sometimes. She dates guys with names like Jim and Dan. They all do something important that they think they have to explain to me in small words. It’s like they think that young girls aren’t smart enough to understand what a Stock Broker is or what a Podiatrist is. It’s like they think I’m a little unimportant worker bee who needs to make them honey so they can help my mom have babies.

Sometimes, late at night when mom thinks I’m asleep, she has her boyfriends over. One night I heard mom talking to a man and I heard her crying and I heard him tell her, “It’s not you. It’s me.” Even I knew he meant that it was her. He left and never came back after that. Mom never talked about him, again. In the morning, she looked at me, sad, and asked me if I wanted breakfast. She gave me that smile she usually gets right before she goes into the bathroom and cries. She thinks I don’t know about it. “It’s not you,” he said. “It’s me.”

I found a bee today; one more girl on a long list of girls that have gone away and been forgotten. She didn’t look sad or hurt. She knew she was forgotten and it didn’t matter. Why are we here? Do any of us have a reason to keep being alive? Won’t the world just fill in the hole we leave when we die? Why do we live if we are only supposed to die and be forgotten? I don’t think that’s fair.

When I told mom about the bee, she told me that it was all a part of “God’s Plan.” I’ve been thinking about it a lot since this morning. I think a plan where something that spends its entire life working to take care of its family and is then forgotten is a bad plan. I don’t want to be part of a plan where I may one day die and be forgotten just because I’m a girl. I don’t want to be a honey-bee.

I found a beautiful little girl, dead on the ground today, God. I found her and she made me think. I thought really hard and this is what I came up with. I don’t think I agree with your plan. I don’t think this is working out. I really want you to understand, God. It’s not you. It’s me. I don’t think we’ll be seeing each other anymore.

							Love,
							
							Janie B. Hart, age 9