Kathy's Kelter

Chapter One- Mutually Inclusive Dreams

It's raining. It's pouring. Kathy's wide awake due to her expected diagnosis as an insomniac. She was never fond of nursery rhymes; they, being one of the reasons to stay up at dark hours, never made sense. Why have jumping cows, overly adventurous eggs or even drowning spiders in a child's mind? She pondered over the concept of an innocent, yet impenetrable fortress, that was the mind of children.

Kathy stared up at the ceiling, transfixed by the idiosyncratic wave patterns sprawled across it. She mused on how long it must've taken to etch the carvings into the plaster. It must require so much dedication. Skill. Assiduity.

Things which she would never have. Her A Levels haunted her like how water haunts kittens; if she falls in, she may struggle and drown. All she aspired to be was an playwright; does it really require so many essays?

Morbid thoughts tinkled around in Kathy's mind, but she pushed them away. The chirp of crickets alerted her that the world was reposing. Except Australia. Everything's upside down there.

She considered how life would be as a cricket. Free from A Levels? Liberated from society's crushing impositions? Possibly, though they breathe through their knees. That disgusted Kathy, so she disregarded the thought. Underwhelmed by sleep, Kathy found herself concussed into a constricting slumber.

• • •

Among the savanna trees, Kathy gazed admiringly at the dancing salamanders. Opposite them lay the eye-eyes - their piercing stare focused on learning the moves. This was illustrious. This was inspiring. Life actually felt... good for once. Swaying to the samba drums, Kathy goggled at the landscape. The sun was so vivid it was hard not to look.

Wasn't she taught not to look at the sun, since it can mangle your eyesight? Oh well, Kathy doesn't play by the rules. However, the sun was strangely easy to look at. In fact, it almost looked like a... mushroom? A lamp? Before she could question what a lamp was doing buoyant in the African skies, the shape of her room formed around her.

She had been dreaming.

The revolting taste of vomit. Never one to mess with, Kathy rived her bed sheets from her body, floundered across the disorderly bedroom and stumbled through the drift wood door frame. She wretched. The tiles of the bathroom around the toilet would be added to the never ending list of chores to be fulfilled by the termination of the week. Breathing in her usual haste, Kathy held her waves of tawny brown hair back with one hand as the other consciously reaches for a towel. She found it, and pulled it closer, but with this force came a struggle. Something was weighing the towel down.