Katherine kept forgetting to talk to people. Words felt like grey pebbles in her mouth. Her dry lips sand-papered away syllables and the maid would pause at the door confused as to what she would have her do. The slow aching sense of her whole body slipping out of her control seemed to have taken away her speech. She had written enough words in her life and now she was tired of them. Letters would arrive each day and remind her that she was the author of this story and that one and then there was this Katherine Mansfield who could barely manage to get to the toilet on time. Faintly disgusted with herself she brought her hand out in front of her and watched its small thin movements.
I am turning into an aged insect..
Something rustled behind her tall chair. It sounded hurried and eager. Couldn’t be a letter as she had read nothing today. Couldn’t be a newspaper as she had given up paying the boy. Mice were all over this house. Sometimes alive, many times victims of Jaque’s sly traps. His dedication to death was exemplary she was told. Marked out they told her, by his breathing habits. When he greeted her she should be able to know straight away if there had been any succcess that day. His breathlessness always made her feel ugly and sick and she would try to get him out of the room before he would shyly offer her a gifted tray of headless fragments of tiny bloody mice.