Kendall The String

Kendall was a string. The arc of her body stretched and interlaced with her fellow strings to form an intricately woven pattern. Kendall and this family of strings, as they soon became, lay day and night, awaiting some unknown fate. For what, Kendall hadn’t a notion, so she asked her mother one dreary and lazy string day what they were to do.

“What do you mean?” her mother asked soothingly, “Why are all of us strings here?”
“I mean—what is our purpose?” Kendall begged, with shoddily masked exasperation.
“We are a dreamcatcher,” Kendall’s mother replied in her most patient of tones, and the other strings hummed lazily in agreement. “We are here to catch bad dreams and nightmares, to make sure that they do not enter this world.”

So, the matter was settled, and several dreary string days passed, when one string morning, on the finest summer day of the entire string year, the web of strings found themselves hanging on a wall.

“This isn’t bad at all,” a contented Kendall thought to herself, and so she and her mother stretched next to each other, basking in the warmth of the sun’s rays passing through the window across from their wall (whose inviting sage tones were by far more aesthetically pleasing than the utter darkness of their previous home in a musty cardboard box).

Kendall watched through the window a world which she had never seen in her little string life. Roses bursting with pink and fuchsia blooms, which in the delicate wafting currents ebbed and flowed to the same rhythm of the buzz of bees busying themselves in the breeze, caught her little string eyes. She wondered just how it would feel to have her family of strings hung in that world, what magic she could experience, and if they could sway in the breeze just like the poplar treesif only given the chance.

That very string night, something out of the ordinary happened.
Kendall and her family saw terrible things in the lonely darkness, and every fibre of their beings screamed at the sight of monsters, the sensation of falling, and the stabbing insecurity that plague and define human dreams. All of it was every bit as real as the delicate roses outside Kendall’s window. Kendall struggled against the confines of her string web, suddenly wanting nothing more than to escape the terrifying visions.

She cried in fear to her mother one last, simple question, “What are these horrible things, mom?” They both quivered from the fear and physical tension that held them in place, as well as from the shaking of the rest of the web, whose sobbing cries and pleas for mercy caused the entire dreamcatcher to reverbrate with unhappiness. “These are the nightmares,” her mother replied, with a heavy and authoritative, but helpless sigh, “and our sole purpose is to catch them.”

So the strings were sad. Most of them hung morosely, hopelessly even.
And most of their string days were occupied with terrified anticipation of the night-time, and the horrors they were sure would accompany it.

Kendall the String alone continued to gaze longingly out of the window, and even her mother chastised her for it. Kendall wanted to die. But, strings cannot die, and she was charged, she felt, with a Sisyphean task, for a crime she hadn’t committed. Slowly, the warmth of injustice rose through her little string fibers, and coursed through her little string veins.

It was a good thing then, that the morning after a particularly nasty nightmare, whether it was due to the delicacy of their little web, or the chutzpah of little Kendall, she snapped.

It was an even better thing that a soft ocean breeze played through the window, carrying her off into a bright new world.