elegant features caught all the wrong attention. Some of the locals called her La Flor de la Orilla, the flower of the shore. A name Isabela detested because it sounded cheap. Orquídea didn’t like it because she knew she wasn’t a flower, delicate and pretty and waiting to be plucked. For what? To be smelled? To sit in a glass of water until she withered? She was more than that. She wanted to be rooted so deep into the earth that nothing, no human, no force of nature, save an act of the heavens themselves, could rip her out.
