Ever since she was a child, Esmeralda never felt loved.

It seemed as if everything she did was wrong. Her parents even preferred her younger sister, Genevieve, more. She was beautiful, after all. Long, flowing golden hair, flawless skin, and sky blue eyes. And Esmeralda looked nothing like that. Mucky brown hair, mud colored eyes, her skin was covered in warts, and her chin jutted out at a funny angle.

“Those warts must be from all those animals you play with!” her mother would say.

Yes, it seemed like the only friends Esmeralda had were the animals that lived in the woods behind her home. Maybe they saw the inside beauty in people rather than the outside beauty. They were great listeners, too. She would sit in the woods behind her home all day and talk to them. She’d rant on and on about her parents and her sister. Why couldn’t she do anything right?

Their schoolteacher loved Genevieve, most of them didn’t know what to think of Esmeralda. Maybe they thought: How could Genevieve have a sister like that? Esmeralda was never good at school. Genevieve excelled at everything. Reading and writing, playing the flute, being a teachers’ pet! Esmeralda couldn’t stand it! Why was Genevieve the perfect one? Why could she be the perfect one?

Overtime, Esmeralda grew to hate everyone but her animal friends. She never found love, never married, never had kids. Now she lived on the top of a cliff over-looking the Village where she grew up, the Village where her family lived, with only the company of her animals. She never went down to the Village anymore, she had people, and animals, who would bring the supplies she needed to her. Some days she would just sit in her small wooded, broken down home and glare down at her old home. This, however, cause her face to become a permanent scowl.

Some of the animals stayed with her, some left too. Esmeralda pondered this.

Could it have been she who caused so many of her animals to leave and never come back? She brushed the thought away, but, somehow, she always found herself coming back to that question.

Her sister, Genevieve, still as beautiful as ever, married, and had a young daughter named Nesa, had once come to Esmeralda’s small home. She had looked slightly repulsed by her sisters’ lifestyle, but Genevieve brushed it aside and begged her sister to come and live with her and her family down in the Village. Esmeralda had refused and slammed the door in her sisters’ face.

As days and months and years went by, Esmeralda’s parents passed away when Nesa was at the age of 10. More and more of Esmeralda’s animals left. Is it because of me? she asked herself. She had once thought that they saw what was on the inside and not the outside. Had Esmeralda become ugly inside and out?

Genevieve wrote letters to her sister, even though Esmeralda did not write back. And from what she could tell, Nesa was growing up to look just like her mother.

What Nesa was almost ready to get married and start her own family, Esmeralda thought about taking Genevieve up on her offer. She would walk slowly down the winding trail to the Village. But when she reached the edge of the Village’s boundaries, she would turn back. What was she afraid of? Only three animals still stayed with her: a raccoon who loved to tear up her flower bed and steal bird seed, a brown toad who hardly ever moved, and a woodpecker who always woke her up at the crack of dawn. These animals were not he friends.

So, one day, the day when Nesa’s children were the ages seven and ten, the day when even her beautiful sister had wrinkles, Esmeralda told herself that she would walk down to the Village and live with her sister.

But it seemed that death was at her doorstep.

As Esmeralda walked through the threshold of her small home, something clicked inside.

She collapsed to the ground.

Maybe it was her old age. Maybe it was her dirty lifestyle and the warts that covered her body. Maybe her heart was just too sorrow-filled to beat anymore.

Whatever the case, the animals that had once loved Esmeralda, dug her a grave and buried her. They surrounded the grave with wild flowers and sat there for a sorrow-filed vigil. If only Esmeralda had realized sooner that the animals loved and missed her old self.

Although many people didn’t know of Esmeralda, the animals kept her spirit alive. They tried to make the angry and sad happy in hopes that no one would a fate like Esmeralda’s. Some time they succeeded, some time they failed. But for the lives they had failed, they would bury them and surround the grave with wild flowers, just like Esmeralda.

They wish none would meet this terrible fate.