"Tell Them" by Tehlor Kay Mejia
An excerpt from The Star, now available for purchase
Today we are publishing an excerpt from The Star anthology: an exquisite piece of speculative fiction by Tehlor Kay Mejia set in a post-capitalist future when the earth is rewilding. It’s about bees, our deep connection to the natural world, and the magic of faith.
Tehlor is a bestselling and award-winning novelist of more than ten critically acclaimed novels across age categories and genres. They strive to create stories that showcase the importance of community, radical inclusion, and abolitionist values.
Tehlor shares more about their relationship to The Star card in a mini personal essay below.
"As a Saturn-ruled person, I think I was born fearing the Tower’s collapse. They seemed to fall down all around me. The ones I built, the ones I stood beneath for shade, the ones I admired from afar. I spent my younger years in a state of chaos, waiting fearfully for the next, relearning the lesson again and again.
The first time I made it out of the rubble and into the meadow of the Star, I was battered. Weary. Lost. I didn’t know where I’d arrived, only that it was quiet, and I could rest a moment. I was too dysregulated to appreciate the beauty, that first time, but my stays became longer and longer until at last I looked up and felt peace.
The Star, to me, is the place that meadow lives when I’m not in it. The quiet, twinkling faith, burning eternal, that the world within it is there, and I will reach it again. The Star is the world we imagine when our own is crumbling. Whether the world we all share or the more private worlds that live within us.
The Star doesn’t demand proof that its meadow exists, or that we can reach it. It simply shines, quietly, in the darkest parts of our soul’s night. It asks us gently what we will build in the place of what we have lost. It tells us those dreams, while tender and new and still painful to speak of, are not only possible. They are already within us, ready to be born.
There are many Tower collapses I would not have survived without that steady light showing me where to steer my ship. The Star is home—not the place I live, but the place I belong. As we struggle collectively against the greatest Tower tremors of our lifetime, we need the Star more than ever. The hope—the faith—that the world we’re fighting for is already there. We only have to follow what burns brightly and eternally within us until we reach it.”
—Tehlor Kay Mejia
Thank you to everyone who’s supported The Star anthology—we have sold 30% of our inventory! This print issue features more than 30 writers and artists. It’s a beautiful full-color book with 114 pages of fiction (like Tehlor’s story), essays, poetry, interviews, creative non-fiction, and original artwork. We redistribute all profits to social justice orgs.
Read more about our mission.
Tell Them
by Tehlor Kay Mejia
When I first see one, I don’t trust my eyes. I’ve been looking for so long that it seems like a figment of a dream spilling over into the waking world. A sign of preoccupation, not of the hope I’ve been so desperately chasing all these years.
It started mundanely enough—my obsession. As someone born under the Harvest Star, it was no surprise that I was drawn to cultivation. I worked long hours in the fields, doing the holy work of pollination with a small brush made of wood and horsehair. It was hard work, but sacred. It fostered life; it fed the community. Watching the flowers close, the fruits bulge and ripen, brought me satisfaction and joy.
Only it wasn’t enough.
Two hundred years after the famines of the Great Unmaking, we were still struggling to recover from what had been done to the world. At first, there had been so few people left that feeding them was easy. And then, thriving outside the violence of the old rulers’ greed, the populations began to grow again.
It was a beautiful world. So different from the stories of Before. We knew them by the asphalt, cracked now where the roots bulged beneath it. The empty towers they’d stretched to the sky in their hubris were overgrown, home to plants and wildlife and folks brave enough to take shelter within them, though sometimes they toppled. Structures built for another time.
Most of the books were gone. They’d stopped valuing them, it is said, but when the Unmaking began many were destroyed for the knowledge within. Knowledge had become the enemy of the old rulers, and those they tricked into following them did their bidding by first forbidding and then destroying the tomes. The rest were ruined by flood, by fire. A loss I mourned, even as someone who had never seen the halls full of them.
In the few damaged volumes we could recover, I read about how so many had been fed before the horsehair brushes. Unfathomable numbers of people, a million times our current population. How had they done it?
That’s when I discovered them.
What information I could find felt whimsical at best. Little sprites, I’d thought them at first, who flew from bloom to bloom spreading pollen. Imprinted with an innate knowledge of how to encourage gentle growth in the right seasons. A fairytale. It had to be.
But the deeper I dove into the lore of the little ones, the more I became convinced they’d really existed.
I roamed far from the village where I’d been born in search of information. Anything to explain what these “bees” had been, what they had done, and what had happened to them.
Everything I learned drew me in deeper.
They were not, as one sheaf of half-torn pages suggested, simply insects. I had seen insects aplenty working in the fields. Eating at the leaves, nesting in the crease between stalk and stem. Some harmless, others devastating.
The little ones I studied weren’t like that. They were something more. The folks I spoke to in villages far flung from my own painted them as spiritual guides, symbols of the changing of seasons, members of great families. They alone made the nectar given to gods and spirits on the altars. Their wax and honey were used in elaborate rituals and mundane daily magic.
And their pollination… it was so much more than just depositing fertile dust between blooms as the books had drily explained. In my travels, I learned it was a thread of connection that once joined every living soul—human and otherwise—in the world. I wondered if the writers of the old books had known that when they spoke of God, of grand design and meaning-making and the force that animated the world… had they known what they really spoke of was these creatures?
And if they had, why hadn’t they fought harder to protect them?
Read the rest of the short story by ordering your copy of The Star.
