MINA [#Wattys2014]

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Eight months later...

Sunlight poured through the cracks and tears in the thin ragged curtain casting interesting shapes across the bed and its sleeping occupant. She grumbled incoherently as she flipped from her side to her back in an attempt to avoid the bright colors dancing across her closed eyelids. It wasn't too long before she was jarred from her rapidly receding dream with the realization that the rays hit her from all angles, preventing her from falling back to sleep.

She would really have to find the time to get that 'new' curtain she saw in the department store down the street, she mused sleepily with a yawn.

"Or mend this old one," she thought aloud, "again."

Oh what the hell, it would cost much, much less to run it under the sewing machine one more time. Just the mere thought of dipping into her rainy day funds for a curtain made her feel guilty. On a measly substitute high school teacher's salary, buying a new curtain was a luxury she could not afford right at the moment, no matter how clearly she could see the risen sun out her window.

"They'll just have to wait." She thought.

She pulled herself off the lumpy mattress, feeling ancient and groggy from the lack of proper sleep. It was hard to sleep comfortably on that thing she called a bed, and she tried not to think very hard about the fact that there were two new lumps that hadn't been there last night, or the fact that one of them just moved...because if she did, she'd end up sleeping on the floor, which, granted, was out of the question. Her vermin neighbors had already staked their claim long since she'd moved in.

Bad as it were she had to make do with the stream of sunlight that never failed to wake her when it got to that precise altitude in the sky. That had taken some adjusting to but on the brightside, she'd never needed to get an alarm clock....but it had taken her some time to get used to the transformation into an early riser.

She groaned as she zombie walked to the bathroom. She was only twenty-four years old but she easily felt eighty. And it wasn't simply that she rolled out of bed feeling that way every morning, but her spending habits were misery at best and atrocious at worst. It was so bad that she couldn't even remember when last it was that she had gone 'wild' and splurged on anything special for herself? It took a great amount of effort to remember that far back to a time like that, that it bordered so close on 'never have existed', that she felt justified in thinking she had dreamt it.

For the last seven and a half months, 'special' was buying cream and sweetener for her coffee watching it lighten as she blended it with a little sugar, instead of drinking it straight, black and fresh; which some might agree was even better but, she had a sweet tooth, and when she craved it, she craved it. But to be honest, once you hit rock bottom like she did, a taste for straight black coffee which one could argue was an acquired taste, even the cheap kind was better than no coffee at all.

Then there was the feat of finding reasonably priced used articles of anything in the department store she'd discovered on her move up here. Even harder still were finding those which still looked to be in mint condition. It didn't matter that she did not really have any use for most of the nic-nacs she found, but being able to just buy something for the sake of spending the money because she could, screw the price, was only second to a long hot bath...or believe it or not, just a simple pack of air-fresheners.

Her place reeked.

And that was just one of the many things wrong with her 'new' place. The face basin's tap had stopped working so long ago that she had to resort to brushing her teeth in the shower while she had a bath, and risk getting soaked from head to toe as her shower head had its moments when it seemed to be touched the devil. To top it off she had no mirror in the entire apartment either. Thanks to the last freak earthquake approximately one hundred and seventeen days earlier, if she remembered correctly and boy did she, the lone mirror in the bathroon had fallen off the wall and broken into a gazillion pieces, thus beginning her seven years of bad luck, she had decided and not to mention her first whiff of that horrible smell that had come to stay. Still she was surprised that the apartment itself was still standing...which considering all she'd experienced since moving there was a miracle in itself.