/lit/ - Literature

>>19809346
>She caught hold of the narrow wooden edging which went round the attic, pulled herself up and lay quite still. Gradually she got up on all fours and waited until her legs stopped shaking, and didn’t feel the slightest bit ridiculous. Step by step she began to go a little farther, her face against the wall. She came to window after window, but they were all closed. Her nose was too long and got in the way, her hair fell over her eyes and tickled her nose: I mustn’t sneeze, if I do I shall lose my balance… I mustn’t look and I mustn’t even think. The heel of one of my slippers is all twisted, nobody cares what happens to me, my corset is all wrinkled up somewhere and any second now of all these awful seconds…
>It started to rain again. Fillyjonk opened her eyes and saw the steep roof over her shoulder and the edge of the roof and the fall below it through nothing and her legs started to shake again and everything began to go round and round – the dizziness had come. It pulled her away from the wall, the edge she was standing on became as thin and narrow as a razor, and in one interminable second she tumbled all the way back through the whole of her fillyjonkish life. Very slowly she leant backwards, away from safety and towards the inexorable angle at which she would fall, was suspended there for what seemed like another eternity, and then sank forwards again.
>Now she was nothing at all, just something that was trying to make itself as flat as possible and move on. There was the window. The wind had slammed it tight shut. The window-frame was smooth and bare and there was nothing there to catch hold of and pull on, not even the smallest little nail. Fillyjonk tried with a hairpin, but it just bent. There inside she could see the bowl with the soapy water and the duster, an impassive picture of a commonplace, an unattainable world.
>The duster! It had got caught in the window-frame… Fillyjonk’s heart began to pound – she could see a little bit of the corner of the duster sticking out, she took hold of it, oh so carefully, and pulled it gently… Oh, please don’t let it break, let it be my lovely new duster and not the old one… I shall never save old dusters again, I shall never save anything again, I shall be extravagant, I shall stop cleaning up, I do too much of it anyway, I’m pernickety… I shall be something quite different but not a fillyjonk… This is what Fillyjonk thought, imploringly, but hopelessly, because a fillyjonk can never, of course, be anything but a fillyjonk.
>The duster held. Slowly the window opened again and the wind banged it against the wall and Fillyjonk flung herself headlong into the safety of the room and lay on the floor and her stomach started going round and round and she felt terribly sick.