The Bed.

She could feel and see herself shaking: small tremours that rocked her hunched body and rattled her pores. The tremours were intermittent: they came and they left her battered, like a hurricane or the-cold-beofre-the-hot in a shower. It made her feel weak and young and soft and wishing for warmth.
To the touch, she was hot, she was burning.
Maybe, she thought lazily, idly, maybe if a drop of water were to fall on my head it would turn to steam.

She'd seen in a film how you could cook an egg on a car bonnet in the heat of summer on a dry barren desert-side road, perhaps this was a scenario her body was emulating. Perhaps she had watched too many hazy Western films, where such scenes (although not always played out with such similarity) were commonplace. She loved the Western films because of the cowboys. She loved their faces: the sun-filled wrinkles, the brown faces contrasted so breathtakingly by these sharp and sudden blue eyes. Their accents were always so drawling and laconic and leisurely. It was like they had every second of time to say what they wanted to. But often she couldn't understand what the cowboys were saying, because the drawl was so thick. But this did not bother her too much.

She was hunched on her bed, cowering against the wall. The wall was a pale baby yellow, a colour that only looked good in the dark. She had often wondered why such a hideous colour had ever been foisted upon the world. Was God inflicting some punishment upon a particularly wicked person? The colour could be described as:  not-even-creme, vomit white, off white, dirty white, soiled white, dirty hanky, jaundiced skin, sad sad sunshine. Can you see it in your mind? I bet you're grimacing. The girl refused to look at the wall in the light, which is why she now needed glasses.
She said to her parents when she was old enough to talk:
"This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me."

She was loath to even decorate the walls, for this would have seemed like an okaying of the foul shade. It would have been like saying: Hey Wall, you're ugly and I hate you but that is okay, here, be friends with my poster of Azealia B." It would have been like losing some ultimate big battle: herself versus Wall. And she couldn't lose, because she had to live in this rectangle room every day and she would have to see it sneering at her, with such an invisible expression of scorn and something.

She was hot to the touch but cold so cold. She wished now that she'd made her bed because her duvet lay lumpy and unwelcoming on the floor. It required a certain dexterity and drive to make her bed. One that she was yet to really find. She was kind of at that age when she was maybe meant to find herself, but such revelation was yet to occur. Especially in the bed category. Sometimes she even slept on her bed without a sheet, because she was too lazy to put it on. The corners, especially, were hard to do. She liked to wait for her mother to get so mad that she would make it herself, but this time had not yet come to pass.