Burning up

She was anxious but now she was calm
Her heart throbbed to a curious beat, she had heard her uncle also had irregular heartbeat.
But she didn't want to be a hypochondriac, they are lame. She didn't want to be one of them.
Her hands were smooth although she didn't moisturise. They were small hands sometimes nimble, often not. She couldn't play the piano but she had once captivated an elderly lady with her cello playing. Her father, he had sung in his high school choir. And so had she, but she wasn't good enough.
Her hands were trembling slightly slowly irregularly. Her head was warm and then hot and her eyelids felt weighed down, drooping. She always remembered when Jerry propped Tom's eyelids up with matchsticks. When she was a young child she had had a double-video of Tom and Jerry. She watched it many times and thought it was very funny, although there was not often much narrative progression.
When she was younger, in those days of Tom and Jerry, she liked to read Enid Blyton. She loved all her books. She liked to read the Famous Five book that her dad had won in primary school. It might life seem mighty big. It made her a bit sad to think that maybe kids these days didn't read much Enid Blyton, because maybe there were racist or sexist or something-ist undertones. Bet those people who say that didn't read the Magical Faraway Tree and imagine themselves in wonderful crazy lands with talking saucepans.
It was embarassing for her to admit, but she used to believe in the Care Bears. Maybe it was some sort of false hope. She was not naive (or she didn't think she was), but she found herself somewhat convinced of the existence of the fluffy colourful friendly bears. Maybe she just hoped they were real. She also cried when she watched Brother Bear. It was an excellent film that she saw at the movies with her friend called Sarah. She remembered, the soundtrack was by Phil Collins, that great balding man. He sang with a passion that resonated through her young soul and made tears peak in the corner of her green eyes.

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.