and then you trip

[lastofthekellys]

WHO: Kate Kelly
WHERE: The Inn
WHEN: 15th August and up to a week after
OPEN TO: Inn residents + whoever would wander in/visit
WARNINGS: TBA (though a general warning for Kate's very unhappy headspace)
STATUS: Open

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Closed

After her fall, after her ankle is tended to and she's in clean clothes (because she's, at least, made some of them, tablecloth skirt and sheet-blouse) and she's told to rest, keep her ankle elevated, Kate doesn't know what to do.

She could ask for her sewing, except she's so tired, she forgot, and is anyone around?

She could sleep. Should sleep, maybe. But there are things to do and there's Joe. Joe, Joe, Joe, her beautiful Joe whose face flashes behind her eyelids if she starts to slip away into dreams.

So instead, Kate lies on the couch in the inn's second-floor sitting room, in what she presumes had once been the owner's two-room private suite, with her ankle resting on a cushion, and she stares at the ceiling.

Eventually, she starts to cry.

Open - feel free to catch her anywhere.

Kate's never been good at doing nothing. Too many years of too many chores, and she knows it is better to keep her mind occupied in the current situation. And anyway, there is still so much to do, for the community at large and for the inn and for herself.

Cleaning, cooking, sewing.

She does rest, of course. By her standards, at any rate. The chores, initially, she limits to those she can do kneeling. Particularly, scrubbing the kitchen floor. Square by square, from one wall to the other. Cleaning the mud and dirt that people walk in every day now that the kitchen's being used that often.

With cooking, too, she's good. She sits. She has a stool to rest her ankle on. She can chop like this, strip plants of whatever stingers or protections they have, cut them finely for the day's stew. She can butcher meat. She can sit to the side in the kitchen, and cure pelts while other people stand and walk and move around freely. Kate doesn't know if the pelts will be useful, but she saves what she needs and gets on with it.

With the Mysterious Box of Salt, she can jerk meat a bit more thoroughly now, and it's nicely a job that requires a lot of sitting if she has to. Sit to prepare the meat. Sit to watch it as it's dried out, make sure the heat in the oven isn't too much. It makes her feel better, anyway.

When the kitchen is emptied in the afternoons and evenings, Kate sits at the worktable and experiments in slicing spruce root. Working out how best to cut it to work with. Baskets is one reason: corset boning is another.

The sewing, she admits is mostly for herself unless anyone requests anything. Clothes. Proper clothes. Whoever put her in this place took her clothes from her, stripped her and made her wear what they chose, and Kate refuses to play that particular game like this.

Sometimes she sews outside, in the sun. Others, she's in the little sitting room, ankle up and putting neat stitches into cloth. She'd look demure, but then, looks can be deceiving.