Dandelion: The Extraordinary Life of a Misfit by Mawe Sheelagh

Author:Mawe, Sheelagh [Mawe, Sheelagh]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Totally Unique Thoughts
Published: 2010-12-12T16:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Wise he was! The wisest creature Dandelion was ever to know, man or beast.

Not that she understood the depths of his wit or wisdom all at once. Often she thought him demented. Other times unkind, cruel even.

In her first days in the valley she hardly knew he was there, being too occupied setting herself to rights as it were. There were her wits to heal with rest and her body with food. But as she grew strong again, she found herself seeking his companionship often, until at the end she plagued him half to death with her everlasting questions. She forgot her first revulsion of his dirty, misshapen body and came to recognize only the essence of him staring out at her through his eyes. They were young, those eyes. And clear. The eyes of youth sunk in an ancient skull.

Of course Dandelion told him the sorry story of her life, it being the only thing she had, or ever would have, that belonged to her alone.

Layer by layer, as soon as she could and as fast as she could, she peeled it back for his inspection, her words coming in torrents as she discovered the luxury of a kindly listener.

Hours it took her and never once did he interrupt. Only his dark, knowing eyes showing that he heard her every word. And when it was all exposed, out there for the two of them to inspect, she sought his approval for all of her actions.

“You do see how it was with me then, don't you?” she asked, anxious for the pity he surely owed her. “Me being neither work horse nor race horse and having Arab blood besides. And being too small for one and without the proper bloodlines for the other and… not belonging anywhere?”

He nodded.

“And that's not the whole of it,” she hurried on, urgent by then in her need for sympathy to shine out of his wise eyes. “Now I find I can't live with a master nor yet alone. I am not what I am supposed to be, don't you see? There is no place I belong. I am nothing…” At those words she wrenched her own heart so badly she could not go on.

Slowly Timothy shifted his weight from one foot to the other, worrying Dandelion, as he always did, that he would topple in the endeavor, and asked, “And what in the name of all that's holy is it you're thinking you're supposed to be then?”

“Why a work horse,” Dandelion said, impatient he had not understood her from the first.

“And did you never, in all this long while, think to see yourself simply as yourself?”

“As meself?”

“Aye. Yourself. Neither work horse nor race horse, just yourself.”

“To be sure and I'm meself. Isn't every living thing itself? But I wanted to be more than meself. I wanted to be a race horse!”

“I heard you the first time, me darling. A race horse without a race. And it's wondering, too, I am why you're after setting such limits to yourself, limits that for sure exist only in your own mind and no place else.

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