Gather finally finds some green.
The world outside the museum is a strange one. The air still tastes of the sea and the jungle, like it did when Gather first walked this earth. The air also tastes of bitter smoke and the smells of human beings, the same breed of creature who hunted her down when she was first alive.
Her first day back to life has been difficult. At night, there were shadows she could slip into and walls she could hide behind. When the sun came up, the world filled with humans.
They make so much noise! They put the howler monkeys to shame. The humans also move fast in those hard shells they ride around in.
Gather needs to stay away from the humans. Most of the time, they pay no attention to her. She uses her sitting-still skills to hide in plain sight. Mostly the humans move past her, not seeing her, too busy hunting something else. Now and then a tiny human will point up at her and make some noise, but they get pulled away by a bigger human, too busy to stop and see.
It has been a long, hard day for Gather, trying to find a peaceful place to sit.
Finally, she finds the park.
There is a fence around the park, but that is no barrier for someone as big as Gather. She is over it in a jiffy. Then she is in the trees and the green. The grass is shorter than she remembers it, and the trees are sparser than they should be, but the place is earthy and soft and smells good. There are no cannonball trees in the park, but she finds bougainvillea flowers to eat and water in a pond to drink. She fills her belly, then shuffles into a lovely cool spot under a group of trees and settles in there to rest out of the heat.
Visitors come to the park and stand very close to Gather but they do not see her. They are there to get their picture taken next to the nearby statue of Gandhi, a Guyanese hero because he stood up to tyranny.
They see what they are prepared to see.
They are not ready to see anything else.