Kathy pushed her glasses back onto the bridge of her nose rather clumsily with the back of her wrist. They had become loose and seemed to keep sliding off her rather tiny nose. It was particularly frustrating on these summer days when everything that touched her skin was too hot. The plastic frames felt heavy and the relentless moistness of the little pearls of sweat wedged beneath them really annoyed her. She couldn't understand why her parents wouldn't buy her contact lenses even after all her attempts to demonstrate why it was logically imperative that she have them. She sat crouched against a wall, under the asbestos shed in the tiny room on their terrace that they had built to house all those unused odds and ends that had long lost their place in her home.

There was a rusty fan that she had found in the clutter, the first time she had tried to make space for herself there. It whirred a little too loudly and always gave away where she was. Not that it mattered, because for the most part, they left her alone. But she liked being lost to another space and time when she was reading and the whirring dragged her out of that world every so often. She did like to stare at it while she mulled however, the revolving blades hypnotic, almost dulling. Twirling idle strands that fell on her face, she would lose herself to a reverie, slipping in and out between make believe worlds and dusty reality.

She unfixed her gaze and looked down to her book. It had a lovely soft leather cover, a deep red hide. The kind you had to pay a lot of money to buy these days. She held a finger carefully between the pages to mark her place as she surveyed the gold lettering, bold and antiquated, etched into the leather. Closing her eyes, she ran her finger over the grooves and indentations of the title - Lord Of The Flies.