Free Honey is Sweeter than Blood by Jeffrey Thomas

almost flinched.  She ran a finger lightly along inside a groove.  An ant traveled in another groove.  Diane took in long slow breaths of the mushroom-darkened air.  
    She turned at a faint rustling of the grass near the mammoth roots in time to see a breeze sweep gently down through it.  
    Diane came back with her book the next day.
    *     *     *
    It was dusk, eight-thirty on a July evening.  
    Diane had stepped out of her underpants, and trembled as she straightened, hugged her goose-bumped arms across her breasts.  She felt as if her new husband lay on their honeymoon bed watching her, smiling, patting the sheets invitingly.  But she had no husband.  She was alone.  Before her stretched the gravestones almost phosphorescent in the black-grassed gloom.  
    The soundless heat lightning lit the horizon, silhouetting tree-tops and the ominous silo.  It was this lightning which had inspired her to ride out here, as if it had summoned her.  With its energy.  Its power.
    She was afraid…but her body crawled with hungry ants and fluttered with birds.  See? An ant had just crawled onto her bare foot…but she nervously brushed it away.  
    She was waiting.  She didn’t know how to make the first move—she was a virgin.  
    Yes you do, she argued with herself.  You’re just afraid.  You tried it before.  You know how.  You’re just afraid to go all the way.
    I’m not afraid.  I want  this.
    She went behind the tree and hugged her nakedness to it.  She closed her eyes and leaned her cheek hard into it, so that it would leave an impression of its bark there when she moved away.  The smell of damp ancient life was so close.  An ant crawled across her lower lip but this time she let it.  A smile hesitantly blossomed.  Diane moaned a little, and nuzzled her nose into the cracked hide.  She extended her tongue and lazily drew it along a groove in the bark.  On the next stroke she probed another.  The ant crawled into her mouth.  She was a bit apprehensive but swallowed it in saliva.  
    A bright, silent flash made her open her eyes.
    It had grown so much darker in the short time her eyes had been shut, but she could see the grass at the base of the tree swaying.  It rustled.  There was a soft, almost imperceptible rhythm to its stirrings.
    Diane moaned, hooking her fingers into the bark’s grooves, watching the grass stir.  
    She only heard it once, and she was moaning herself when she heard it so she couldn’t be sure of the moan…
    *     *     *
    For her brother’s wedding, Jen had gone out of her way to fix Diane up with her cousin Richard, but Diane hadn’t made the effort to dance with him once…even after she told Diane that Richard had shyly confided in her that he found Diane cute and—she swore to God he’d actually said it—sexy.  How could Diane have been so nonchalant, and smilingly so?
    Today her shadowy concerns about Diane were pulled into stark daylight.  Diane had called her up, sobbing, nearly frantic.  And here they now stood—at the foot of the mound in Pine Grove Cemetery.  
    The mound was yellow.  A vast plateau of a tree stump crowned it.
    Diane clung to her friend’s arm.  “How could they kill it? Why? ”
    “It was old, Di…”
    “It was alive!  It was still alive! Oh god …my tree…”
    “Diane, you’ve got to stop this…come on.”
    Diane drew away, smiling sharply.  “I do have to stop it now, don’t I? They haven’t left me any choice.  All I had and they took it away.  But we can’t have a nasty little menage-a-trois in our pious little cemetery, can we ?”
    “Diane…”
    “Yeah, look at me like that.  You have a boyfriend.  A lover…”
    “Don’t be jealous of me…”
    “I saw them! I could actually see them the last few times, Jen…not just picture them; I saw  them! And they saw me too, I’m sure.  We could have truly joined together, all three of us, I know it, but now they’ve killed them and they’ve