Donkey

Sometimes it’s tough being a donkey. I’m used to it though, even when it’s raining and cold, and I’m all wet and soaked I can usually see the bright side of things. But getting hit by lightening? That’s probably just one step too far for me. I can’t quite turn the other cheek to that. It has made me start to think that maybe I’ve been wrong. Maybe I’m not lucky after all, maybe the gods do have it in for me.

I always thought I was fortunate to be living on the side of this hill. It’s an old volcano apparently. You know, we donkeys aren’t as stupid as we’re always made out to be. I’ve overheard the humans talking, I know what a volcano is. And yes of course I can understand English. Just because I don’t have the fine motor skills in my jaw and mouth and tongue, it doesn’t mean my ears aren’t working. So I’m aware that I’m on the side of a volcano, and I wonder if maybe there’s something of an omen in the whole lightening and volcano thing. Plus there’s the fact that I live on a graveyard, humans seem to hold a lot of superstition around graveyards.

So I always thought I was lucky, there’s plenty of grass here and I’m expected to keep it short, easy enough for someone of my donkeyness. And I get scraps from the priest in the church next to the graveyard, that’s always a treat. For most of the time, life is just quite rosy, if you take a simple perspective. But now I’m wondering, I’m starting to maybe think of this from a human point of view. Maybe I’m cursed.

It isn’t a big graveyard. I’m stuck behind a cast iron fence that keeps me within the same twenty-metre radius my whole life. The area all around my home and up the hillside further, it’s all houses and shops and other kinds of buildings that I can’t quite make out from my vantage point. I’m penned in by the fence, and the fence is penned in by all of the houses. I can’t run free, all I can do is plod the same patch of grass with no other animals around. Oh sure, there are pets in some of the houses, dogs and cats. But they’re all so stuck up, even the dogs wont come near me. I don’t know why they think they’re any different to me. They rely on the humans just as much as I do.

I do have a small tree near one corner of the graveyard. Back in my more optimistic days I used to count that as a blessing. In bad weather I’d scurry towards it for shelter, or at least the idea of shelter. I can see now that it doesn’t keep me any drier or hold off any of the wind. It’s too small to make any difference. The scraps used to make a difference to me on those cold days as well. Something to look forward to. But now that I’m taking a more human outlook on life I can see that the scraps aren’t a treat for me. The scraps are just what someone else didn’t want. I get second choice, and even then it isn’t an actual choice.

When the lightening struck I thought, “oh great, things couldn’t get any worse than this”. But now that I’ve been thinking about it things are pretty dire around here. In fact, I think I was a lot happier before I thought about how unlucky I am.