Chapter One: Daisy CHAPTER ONE DAISY There were two stories of how I was named. One was what Mom told people. Never casually. Only if they asked. It was a dream of a drive long enough that you strain not to doze off, mingled with the extra-sweet tang of wild blueberries. All of Ontario seemed to be built along rough gray roads stretching seemingly forever into the distance, where rolling down your window meant breathing in the sharp smell of burned rubber and stinging asphalt. The sort of tar-black road that scorched your feet with its heat and left the scent on your heels, smoky and stained, lingering in the air. In this dream, Mom pulled onto the shoulder, bright emergency blinkers flashing on an empty highway. When I was little, growing up in a city, it was hard to picture a place I knew to be packed and busy, suddenly devoid. Like a ghost town. Abandoned . With Mom as its only inhabitant. She stepped over the squat metal barrier between expressway and earth, careful with the swollen bump of her belly. She walked into the wreckage of fallen trees, burnt branches crumbling to white ash that stuck to her fingers and still smelled of fire. That's where she found the blueberries. They grew in patches, short, small, and wild, alive in a field of death. You could find the best blueberries after a burn, she'd say. And there, in the midst of gathering the sweet fruit into the hem of her car-sweaty T-shirt, her tongue stained purple with juice, she found something else. A daisy. Inexplicably. In a place where only one plant seemed to grow was this other thing that shouldn't have survived. That was where my name came from. Now, the second story. The one where Grandma whispered that of course a sixteen-year-old would name her kid after a flower. Which meant that the second story wasn't a story at all. Because that was the point, that there wasn't one. That my name was nothing more than a pretty tattoo: permanent and meaningless. Excerpted from Delicious Monsters by Liselle Sambury All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
