Page 89 - November 2020

November 2020 89
Litterateur

DESERT CANDLE

“Owww!” she cried, to nobody. “Ooww!” There wasn’t anybody to cry to.

There was nothing to do but to sit back and brush herself off and look to see if

she was cut anywhere. Her right hand and knee were pretty scraped up and she had to
pick little pieces of rock out of her skin. Her mouth was pretty dry, too, but she began
to lick the palm of her hand. It started to bleed and pretty soon it was a red muddy,
bloody mess. Still, the blood didn’t run too much, so she decided to spit on her fingers
and wipe her knee.

Her knee hurt. She hurt everywhere. Would her hand be O.K.? Would her knee?

“Ooooh!”she cried! She wrapped her arms around her legs and rocked back
and forth,crying,
“Ooooh!Oooooh!” She wished Mommy would come to help her.

After a little while, she got quiet. She should think. What should she do? Rest

for a minute? Make a decision? How long had she been sitting there? She wasn’t sure.
She’d wait a bit.

She was just starting to feel normal again when she noticed something really
different. Right there, next to her, beside the road was something really pretty! It was
weird, like everything on the desert, but yes, it was really something pretty – a weed? –
a cactus? – a flower? Well, weeds weren’t really pretty and cactuses, like the one on
Wade’s mom’s counter, were prickly.

This looked like it could be prickly. It had a fat stem with prickly-looking things
at the
bottom, near where the leaves came out. It had skinny leaves. They weren’t too green,
but the stem was light green, like glow-in-the-dark plastic Jesus green. The best thing
was the tiny flower at the top! Really and truly, it was a flower – a dark, purply flower, a
teeny little one, but a real flower – a dark, purple flower on a glow-in-the-dark stem!

“Wow!” Ashley said aloud, “Wow! Look at that!”

She got a little closer. She looked some more. At their old house she sometimes
picked flowers for Mommy and took them inside. Sometimes Mommy wasn’t happy
when she did that. She started to reach out, but her hand stopped. Something wasn’t
right. Only four or five tiny flowers were here. The stems seemed to be lit up like magic.
They were so weird! Maybe they were poison! Maybe she should leave them here. She
couldn’t decide, so she sat there looking just a little longer. They were really pretty.