He unlaced his arms and took a step forward. 'You hurt?'Not badly.' She tried to smile, but her lips only curved on one side. 'My main problem is that I'm stuck to a cactus.'(...)'How'd you manage to get tangled up with a cactus?' J.T. Crouched beside her and started extricating her from the prickly plant.'Well, believe it or not, I was on my way to apologize to you when a prairie-dog hole jumped up and grabbed my shoe heel.

What a surprise. That boy doesn't have the sense God gave a cactus.

During your struggle society is not a bunch of flowers, it is a bunch of cactus.

Anger was simple, self-sustaining as a cactus. You couldn't look too closely at it, lest the spines get you in the eye.

So they drove again, Vivien sitting up and looking now, but as navigator only, letting the desert scratch its own thorny poetry on the enormous moon.

The cactus thrives in the desert while the fern thrives in the wetland.The fool will try to plant them in the same flowerbox.The florist will sigh and add a wall divider and proper soil to both sides.The grandparent will move the flowerbox halfway out of the sun.The child will turn it around properly so that the fern is in the shade, and not the cactus.The moral of the story?Kids are smart.