Young Writers Society

CHAPTER ONE:

KETTA

Dear Darkness,

I had a nightmare last night.

My thoughts were flowing fast, like rapids of some turbulent stream. They kicked and fought and pummeled my brain. They wove starlit patterns in your folds, dancing in and out like lithe musicians in the glory of the dusk. It was so utterly beautiful.

What was so scary about it, you ask?

I had run out of paper.

Her pen scratched loudly in the night, and she looked around hesitantly before putting it to paper again. She scuffled closer to her stub of a candle, and wrote slowly, trying to be as quiet as possible. Even walls had ears, she knew. And she knew that the darkness always swept sound away faster.

It frightens me sometimes – life. How on earth am I supposed to understand what it is if I have never lived it? It frightens me when the line between my dreams and reality is undeterminable. How do I know that this isn't a dream – being locked up in a dark attic, forbidden to ever mingle with the light that is so close, and yet so far away? How do I know that my nightmares won’t come to life someday? How do I know that someday my voice won’t be crushed forever, crushed so that my silent words will no longer find a medium to travel through? There are paths that your words can take. There are two choices you are given. You can either speak, and let your words float into the atmosphere, melding into the air and weaving through one kind of matter to other matters. Your words travel in waves, like light. Or they can travel on scabbard lanes, traversing paths built on paper-thin stalks. Parchment sounds so much more beautiful than merely saying paper, and yet our lives are so much more similar to the latter. You can crush paper like you crush lives; you can burn it up until there is nothing but ash. Paper is flimsy; our lives are too. They are more similar than we realize, and it is words that sew us together: life to life, paper to paper, death to death.

Words, everywhere.

And running out of paper is like running out of life; because it is my heart and my heart alone that beats in the shadows. I am a word that was never included in the dictionary. I am tainted. I am a solitary being, and it is only you, dear Darkness, who I have for company. I am alone, so wretchedly alone, and it is you I turn to for sympathy. But you never give me any, though I sympathize with you. Sometimes, just sometimes, you give way to light so I can see these words I write. I know you are not completely horrible. You’re miserable too, just like me. Is it because you have never been able to befriend Light either? It is strange, how everyone fears us, is it not? Because we have one thing in common:

Neither of us is supposed to exist.

In fact, I don’t really exist to most of the world. I wonder if the children next door – are there any children next door? I don’t know. Fine, if there are presumably children next door, would they imagine that a young girl is spending her life locked up in a dark attic? It is there that she will live and it is there that she will die. But I do not consider myself alive, no - I am already dead. But my soul is held trapped within this flimsy excuse of a life. In simple words, I am trapped in a living death. I know not of the seasons, nor of the day and night. I know they exist, just as I exist, and yet we must remain strangers to each other. My world is this dusty little attic, the adjoining room with the U-bend and tap, and Darkness.

Always Darkness.

Are graves this quiet? Are you this afraid to make noise in your grave? But I suppose, when you’re buried in the earthen depths, you have already submitted yourself to your fate. I know the Light lurks out there somewhere, and I hope you won’t despise me, Darkness dear, if I am attracted to it. But I cannot help it. The only light I have is the light from this candle, and it is a fragmented shadow of the real thing. I have a feeling it cannot ever compare.

Just like I am a fragmented bit of the real Ketta, the Ketta-who-could-have-been. I am like a Rapunzel, except that I shall never have my happily-ever-after. I suppose I should be glad I have my words. They help me survive; they help me dream and conjure up worlds in your shadowy cloaks. It is an undisturbed world we have hewn up here, and the only time that world is disturbed is when some food is pushed through the flap somewhere near that wall...

But all the walls look the same when you are here, Nessie. All the time.

There are no windows. There are no doors. There is no entrance to the light except that flap in one of those grim-faced walls, and the light that comes cascading in through it is ... unreal, tinged with this artificial scent that makes me shiver. The food I read about in books seems real. The food I consume (it can’t be called eating, because I merely gulp it down) is metallic. Vegetables, watery soup, hard bread. It’s like a fairy tale of sorts, where the young girl is tortured and starved. But there is no fairy godmother to save me.

And sad realities can never be fairy tales.

Did you know Cinderella was originally called Ashputtel? That it was much more bloody than the later editions? Did you know that there wasn't a fairy godmother in the real version, either? Oh, I've read about all sorts of Cinderellas, both paperback and hardback, editions old and new. That is the only good thing about this attic: the books. They were stored up here long ago, and have remained untouched ever since. There are mountains of books, deserts of paper, and I found a package of old-fashioned pens too. It’s positively providential. When I run out of ink, I shall turn to charcoal. When I run out of charcoal, to paint. But I cannot imagine running out of paper. I could paint words on the walls, but they are low and dark, and covered in dust. It is not the same thing. Paper is an entirely different substance. Nothing is like paper. Paper and words are meant to be.

Maybe it is you and I, Nessie, who were meant to be too.

I don’t understand why I am kept barred from the world. What about me is so disgustingly grotesque, so repugnant that the world doesn't want me? My mother is dead, I know. And my father doesn't care for me. I don’t even think he knows I exist. Below me are my people, people I share blood with, people with the same genetic codes, the same DNA running through their veins. There is only one phrase attached to me, one word that I remember being said to me over and over again. It is an old memory, a memory that has never faded. It is the only memory I have of Light. Everything was bright, but that man’s sneering face tarred the vision. He was proud-looking and handsome, but his hair were completely white, and his nose was cruel, as was the slight twist to his mouth.

“Illegitimate,” he whispered, and there was disgust in his eyes, on his lips. He seemed to recoil at the writhing, chubby mass that was me. I only suppose I was chubby, but I was young then, and all children are supposed to be beautiful. But I don’t know what I look like, so I can only imagine.

In all the books I have read, I have never come across this word. I stumbled upon it, by chance, in an old dictionary. And this was the definition, for I have read it so often, trying to make sense of it that I remember it by heart and could probably murmur it to you in my sleep:

Illegitimate: born of parents who are not married to each other; born out of wedlock

I do not know what that means, but of this I am certain:

I am illegitimate.

Her tiny mouth pursed as she wrote the words: those three words that defined her entire being. It was strange to her, how there were pages upon pages of definitions to every law of science, to every mathematical rule she had ever read of; rifling through the stacks of dusty unused books that filled up her attic. But her definition was short and crude. It was unfinished, and Ketta knew, now more than ever as she surveyed what she had written, that she was never meant to exist.

But she did exist, didn't she? Despite everything, she was living and breathing. And together, she thought determinedly, she and the darkness would find a definition for who she was, and prove that she was much more than just 'illegitimate.' She smiled a crooked smile, but one which was filled with innocence; dimpled and endearing, so that even the darkness gave way for the flame of her lone candle to glow brighter; it illuminated the paper as she scratched out the words:

But I am also Ketta, and I matter.

A/N: If you've read this far, then thank you for reading! This is just the first part of the first chapter, seeing as I felt that the whole chapter was too long to post in one go. It might even be in three parts, but I don't really know. I'll see about that. It'd pretty rough, seeing as this is just the first draft.

Please review!

~Pompadour