Highly Commended Story - You Are Beautiful

“You Are Beautiful” by Malladi Vaishnav Sai Vaibhav, JSS International School, Dubai, UAE, is the Highly Commended story in the junior category of the first biannual Short Story Contest 2019.

Vaishnav Vaibhav is a grade 5 student. His favourite past time is to read books and to solve 3*3 Rubik’s cube. The books he likes are: Diary of a Wimpy kid, Famous five, Tin Tin and so on. He admires all the writers and their creative imagination to create a marvelous script. His teachers and parents are the ones who encourage him to read and do creative writing.

You Are Beautiful

Once upon a time in Bagatelle park, France, where all the plants and insects lived in perfect harmony there was a brown coloured big beehive that hung from a sturdy old tree. In it, resided an erst of bees along with their Queen bee, her highness Reine des abeilles. She preferred her name as Reine. Reine was apprehensive about her looks. She longed to be a flower as she believed flowers were vibrant and beautiful.

“You are pretty and wise” the fellow bees complimented her often but that didn’t help much.

“How dull and plain I look!” she would whine and buzz off to admire the bright flowers.

One day, in the absence of Reine, the drones and worker bees met the flowers in the garden, explained them about the situation their Queen bee was facing and how her inner confidence was getting shattered slowly. They wanted to help Reine, as their entire swarm was getting trapped into a gloomy atmosphere. It had already affected the production of honey in that year.

As soon as the king of flowers, his highness Roi de fleurs aka Sir Roi heard this news, he ordered a letter to be dispatched immediately in the name of the Queen bee. He looked forward to have a meeting with her in the following morning. Reine appeared in a dazzling orange with black stripes attire. Sir Roi was startled and surprised to learn how the Queen bee missed to notice her very own beauty. They both had breakfast together. Sir Roi preferred to have few dew droplets along with early rays of the Sun while Reine had only the royal jelly. Both of them exchanged their opinions about various subjects and then came a topic – BEAUTY.

Sir Roi mentioned that flowers blossom and fade away; it is due to the hard working bees who knew the art of making honey that retains the fresh sweetness of flowers alive. A common saying is "Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder" which means beauty doesn't exist only in the appearance. It is all in our mind how we perceive it. Each of us has a different outlook regarding beauty. Sir Roi concluded saying, “If you ask me, you are beautiful as you are dear Queen”. These words touched the heart of Reine who started to shed tears of joy for she was missing an important point all along. She told herself, “Each of us has our own beauty and duties to perform.” She thanked Sir Roi for his valuable time and words.

From that day onwards, Reine took care of her bee colony with love and affection. She was pleased with the busy buzzers of the hive who stood by her at all times. All the drones and worker bees were happy to see their Queen bee jubilant. They worked even more hard and produced enormous honey for everyone.

Moral: Hard work is the true beauty that sparkles!