When I was six years old and my father died suddenly, my grandmother took me to the zoo to see the armadillo. She didn’t know what to do with me. She was not a cruel woman, but she was the type of person who seemed to have never been a child, and so she thought that an afternoon in the blazing July heat wandering amongst the animals might do me some good when really all I wanted to do was curl up in bed with my stuffed animals and never surface for air.
Annie
Roll-up armor, tip-toeing through, tortoise and armadillo confused poor jaguar and got away, found safety in itself
She was short and skinny, having had malnutrition when she was a child in the refugee camp. But she was smart and spoke up often in class. This made her the target of bullies for being both different and smart and they attacked her, and she would roll up mentally like an armadillo, her strong side on the outside, but the soft parts crying inside.
When I was six years old and my father died suddenly, my grandmother took me to the zoo to see the armadillo. She didn’t know what to do with me. She was not a cruel woman, but she was the type of person who seemed to have never been a child, and so she thought that an afternoon in the blazing July heat wandering amongst the animals might do me some good when really all I wanted to do was curl up in bed with my stuffed animals and never surface for air.
Roll-up armor, tip-toeing through, tortoise and armadillo confused poor jaguar and got away, found safety in itself
She was short and skinny, having had malnutrition when she was a child in the refugee camp. But she was smart and spoke up often in class. This made her the target of bullies for being both different and smart and they attacked her, and she would roll up mentally like an armadillo, her strong side on the outside, but the soft parts crying inside.