[ OT ] Sunday Free Write : Leave A Story , Leave A Comment - End of Camelot Edition

I live, half-live, in this apartment and half in my own world. I am Sara everyday, wake up to walls green from paint and black from mould. I sleep in my school shirt, I have one pair of underwear, I have no hair ties. Me and Unity sit in class and all the things they whisper about us are true - dirty? Check. Got lice? Check. No father? No lunch? No schoolbooks? No prospects? Check check CHECK this is one test I can pass. 
 
 And then home, mama asleep. We live in the half-world. We pull our copybooks out and split up the work. I'll do math, Unity you do the spelling words. Maybe if we split it up we can get most done. That's the real world - sitting on the couch hunched over, still wearing coats ( damn it's cold for April ) whispering'do n't wake mama!' but then we are - off! The numbers they creep off the page and slowly, slowly ( sh! do n't wake mama ) dance around the room. Unity stands on the back of the couch and stretches up with a pencil and writes a four as high as she can.'Oooh mama gon hit' I say and she looks at me, afraid, but then she is - off! Around the room she beats a dainty path, does n't hit anything, one leg flies up and propels a twirls one, two, three times and we are in a ballroom, princesses, making fun of all the dweeby princes who want to dance with us, floating in our dresses - 
 
 Caleb cries. Shush shush baby. We're not here, your diaper is not dirty, none of us have fleas. Unity squats and makes animal noises. We're in the jungle - lions and tigers and bears. Caleb is grand old father elephant, king of the beasts, and we are the bird servants. We flap around the room and squawk our bird music and then swoop down and pick him up in our beaks and fly til he gurgles. King Caleb has two pet bears and they walk on all fours and charge at each other for his entertainment. 
 
 We are all very hungry animals. Unity is a honey badger pretending to open the cupboard with her snout but she knows there is nothing in there already. She is not a honey badger when she climbs on the counter and runs her hand along the shelf and licks the dust off her finger. She cries - real life. 
 
 Mama wakes up, cleans Caleb in the sink, we sit at our homework but we're too sore by now. She kisses our foreheads. Her shift do n't start til 11 but she has to leave now, to drop Caleb to her friend's first. We could mind him, but he can eat there. 
 
 I am in bed, not crying, watching Unity. My school skirt is on the floor but she is folding hers, trying to make it completely smooth. She opens the wardrobe, hardly nothing in there, we lost our clothes leaving the last place but they did n't hardly fit anyway. We have more hangers than clothes. She hangs the skirt carefully. It's still creased. She's gon na cry. 
 
 She gets into the wardrobe, knees in her chin, and takes a deep breath.'Oh lord Sara I'm stuck in a well! I swear to god I am, and it's fillin with water!' 
 
'Oh heck! Oh hell no! Who put my sister down a well?' and I leap out of bed and start to haul her up til she is sitting on the floor sputtering wet and I am her faithful old dog who raised the alarm and then she is a dog too and we are off, a couple of mutts, sniffing and barking and wagging our tails, roaming the backalleys of... London! Paris! Rome! 
 
 Next day our faces are a little more grey, our bellies are a little more sore, my hair has a new tangle, her leg has a new scratch. Who pities us? Strangers, mothers, teachers, kids, lunch ladies, hall monitors, janitors, shopkeepers - all of the fools! They do n't know, we do n't live in this world. We are pharoahs, soldiers, queens, Amazon tribesmen, astronauts, underwater divers, archaeologists, kittens, knights, ghosts, lawyers, robots, zombies! We are anything, anything at all except two pitiable little girls.
