Once there was a girl who had a really quite terrible day.

The toaster blew out. The train was slow. Her chair was squeaky. The tea went cold before she had a chance to drink it. Her boss was unhappy with her work. Her favourite shoe sprang a leak. In a puddle. And when she got home, her cat had vomited in the middle of the sofa.

As she cleaned, wretched, and cleaned, she knew how the story was supposed to go. She was supposed to count her blessings, because it could all have been so much worse. This much was true. The toaster could have exploded. The train could have derailed. The chair could have broken under her. The tea spilled on her lap. The puddle tripped her up. The cat could have been dead.

All of this was true, and she knew it to be true. But it didn’t exactly make her feel any better. In fact, she felt just a little worse. Because now she’d had a bad day and she was ungrateful.

She stared at the cat, who glared back with a look that told her that he, personally, had all day if she wanted to waste it. “I wish I could be a cat,” she said to him, ruffling his head only slightly maliciously in a way she knew he didn’t really like. “If this were a great story we’d swap lives for a day. I’d learn that being a cat is quite boring, and be grateful for my life, and you’d go and… I don’t know. Shit in my in-tray or something.”

There was a moment where, if she was totally honest with herself, she almost expected it to happen. Or for the cat to speak like one from her childhood books. And she became unreasonably irritated when nothing at all happened except for the cat getting fed up and running away. Because she once again had to trample on the little part of herself that believed in something way more exciting and interesting than bloody fairies. Her magic would never come; would stay trapped in paper and pictures, in mirrors and movies.

Why did it all have to be so slow? Why did she have to wait to feel better? A wiser woman than she had once told her that her stomach knew everything. And it was true. Right now, when everything was just a little bit terrible – not a lot, but enough – he belly ached and she felt sick and hungry.

The worst part was, it was such… mediocre… misery. I mean, there was nothing wrong enough to go on a grand destructive rampage, full of symbolism and fatal flaws (though in retrospect she found those a bit irritating; she was exactly the kind of person who could never live with a dreadful secret because her terribly pragmatic soul basically insisted that if everyone just spoke out about their problems the secret wouldn’t bother them in the first place). It was just a bit flat and nothing. A bit here and there. A bit “oh well everything’s okay really“.

The girl drank her tea – hot, this time, thanking goodness for small mercies – and gave the cat a few guilt treats. She scratched at the sore patch in then crook of her elbow, and ate noodles with chilli that was a bit stronger than she could really tolerate but seemed to burn some of the sour taste from her mouth. She eased herself into a bath that, in the tradition of the day so far, ran out of hot water before it was properly relaxing even though she didn’t even like really hot baths (how fair was that?).  In short, she waited. Waited for the lesson, or the realisation, or the epiphany, or even the real misery to show itself.

Impatiently, angrily, she went to bed and had a poor night’s sleep.

The next day should have been better. Shouldn’t it?

This is the sixth attempt in a writing challenge I have set myself.