17/07/2025
"Jane, Married by the Cactus"
By Hon. Ezra Maina
🌵✨ A desert fantasy of dreams, pricks, and promises.
Once upon a warmly weird time in the sandy land of Dustypetal Desert, there lived a cheerful, curious girl named Jane. Jane was not your average desert dweller. While other people wore wide hats and worried about scorpions, Jane wore flower crowns and spoke to the wind like it was her gossiping aunt.
She had a big heart and even bigger dreams: to find magic, meaning, and maybe even a mushroom that sings lullabies.
One evening, as the sunset spilled tangerine juice across the sky, Jane wandered into the whispering part of the desert—the one no map ever dared to draw. There, right in the middle of nowhere, stood a giant cactus wearing a veil.
Yes, a cactus.
With pearls made of dew and arms outstretched like it was mid-slow-dance.
“Are you… waiting for someone?” Jane asked, blinking.
> “Only someone brave enough to believe in me,” said the cactus, its voice dry but dignified.
Now, Jane had heard of odd things—tap-dancing camels, moonlit mirages, and a singing snail once—but never had she been proposed to by a plant.
“I’m Jane,” she said softly.
> “I know,” said the cactus. “You listen. You love deeply. And you don’t try to pluck the petals off things just to see what’s inside. That’s rare.”
Then something happened.
The sky burst into a shower of stardust. A choir of tiny beetles began humming a tune that sounded suspiciously like a wedding march. And Jane, without thinking too hard, took the cactus’s hand—which, surprisingly, didn’t prick her at all.
> “This is a metaphor,” whispered the cactus.
“For what?” Jane asked.
> “For loving something that isn’t soft… but real. For choosing growth even in dry places. For blooming with someone strange but steady.”
And in that shimmering dream-space, Jane was married by the cactus—not in a gown or with a guest list, but in soul. Not to the plant, really, but to the idea that you can find magic in the mos
