“DAISY’S NIGHT GARDEN” by KARIN TAYLOR

Truth is, they exiled me from their barren desert of a garden. That’s why you’ve found me here, here where you never thought to find me, here were you thought I don’t belong and would never survive, although I have.

You’re not large and gray and scrabbly, they told me. You don’t have along enough nose that curls like a sleeping boa constrictor above your mouth, you don’t have a long enough tail that swishes to swat at the flies that seek to bite your behind. Your eyes are round and velvety, there’s no glint of cleverness or slyness within them keen enough to scare away the crocodiles of the lake, and your legs are not stumpy and heavy enough to make the ground resound with your passing. Your hide is the color of burnt sienna, or like that of a dying sunset, or like the aromatic cinnamon that sometimes we see used on the meals of the human hunters; it camouflages better in the gold of day instead of the gray of night. Your disposition is one that helps wild flowers grow and songbirds sing, and it does no good to us.

All that is what they did not tell me. All that is what they’d wished to tell me. Quite simply, quite lonesomely, they only told me: I was different.

~Angreek87