How do you feel about love, and tragedy? What about a tragic, horrific love that was so perfectly awkward at first, but by the hands of fate can never end happily? I believe this story will satisfy exactly that description.
Once quite a while ago, a woman of the young age twenty fell in love with an artist who rode along on her circus train, doing his paintings. She was crazy for his brain, he knew so much, and with all of the book-smarts he had, he stuck to his artistic talents and settled with baffling the girl, who hadn’t gone to college as he had.
There were always hints at the man from the woman about her wanting to settle down, and stop all the traveling she had dedicated to the circus. She had taken the reigns and held them for the past 5 years, after her father passed away.
The man was very self-conscious however, and the woman always seemed to come across to him as the type who would never marry, though he loved her dearly in same way he didn’t know she loved him. With the miscommunication, the man never proposed, even after over two years of dedication to the woman.

The woman had given up on the artist, for the most part. She settled with the small, yet obvious courting the artist could do nothing in his power to restrain from. He really loved the woman, and in all of his paintings, he could never capture her essence. With this, he struggled with a confusion he could hardly bare between desire and the, oh so false, reality he saw in the seemingly independent woman he traveled with.

As she moved on, she dedicated less time to the shy artist and worked on a new act. This one involving an elephant, carrying a large sunflower, which would attract trained bees she had discovered from a circus trainer recently. The bees would swarm around the massive creature, but never sting. She was trying to build up enough confidence to add a rider to the elephant’s back to really set the act a great, dangerous factor for her audience.

Once she had perfected the act, she arranged it into the next night’s show as a finale. After the act was planned, however, she could hardly use it to be as distracting as she needed from the artist. Desperate for his hand, but too embarrassed to ask him face-to-face, the woman wrote a letter to him, confessing her desire and love for the artist and slid it into his chambers.

However, this ending will not be happy, as I have assured you. The woman would perform that night to only meet a tragic fate of a swarm of bees set off by the new perfume the woman only wore for performances as special as this. They stung her to an agonizing death, and right in front of a large crowd.

Not only in front of horrified families, but the artist came in and watched through the back curtain, missing the beginning of the show because he was out buying the woman her engagement ring, having read her letter. Not tragic enough, you say? How about this…

The artist bought the woman her perfume.