Lorna is not special. She sleeps in a thin simple bed with pale white and green sheets. Come morning, she usually eats two eggs with sausage on pastel plastic plates with one of her five forks which would remain in the sink until she had nothing to eat with. She drives a three year old Honda Accord to work, joins her team of coworkers in studying the best places along their route to potentially find new shipwrecks, and analyzing data from the seafloor. She sits with several of her coworkers at lunch, some of them discuss what they will bring on next week's expedition and others argue over the geophysical data assessments they intend to complete after returning to work. Lorna joins the latter group, being enough of a veteran to know the basic of packing for expeditions in the pacific, and after lunch she steals chocolate from the main office's jar and tucks herself into her neighbor's desk in an attempt to help determine if the data they were studying was a new shipwreck or a large unknown organic object.
After work, Lorna returns home to her two bedroom apartment in northern San Diego, which she shares with a polite, if skittish, Ph.D. student in physics because she needs someone to look after her cat and her apartment while she is gone, and because rent is too high for her to really like paying it alone. She makes herself golden potato cauliflower soup, which she eats over her computer because they never did determine what that data suggested. Afterward, she throws clothes in the washer and adds her dishes to the rapidly growing pile in her half of the sink, placing the white bowl haphazardly in the cooled pot and dropping her spoon to the side. Her hamper was only half-full, as she makes a point to clean them every three days, and while her clothes dry she steps into the shower emerges forty-five minutes later hair smooth and skin coconut scented. By the time she hangs her loofa to dry and folds her laundry into drawers and returns to the kitchen for warm tea and cherries, her roommate has dropped the mail on the bar and vanished. She keeps the rent bill, a letter from Berkley suggesting she donate, and throws the junk into the trash.
Her computer sings merrily as she returns to her room, and balancing a tray while closing a door, holding mail, and nearly tripping over her cat, a short gray tortoiseshell with an orange stripe down her face and a long tail that tended to be directly in the way of any passing human, proves to be enough of a challenge that she tosses the mail, letting it flutter to the floor near the bed. By the time Lorna was settled on her bed, Apple had sprawled across her pastel green pillows and begun to stab her in the side with her clawless white paws. They enjoy each other's presence while Lorna snacks and checks the news, and much later, as Lorna falls asleep, the cat begins a long, deep purr.
She dreams, that night, of grey smoke against a bright blue sky, of men holding rifles which cracked sharply and often, ducking desperately into holes when screaming hellfire came across the fields of trampled wheat. Some were slow and died, some had no room in the closest hole and scrambled madly, half-running half-falling, scuttling along on hands and knees, feet spinning madly on damp dirt with the primal need for safety. One man beats out a boy - golden haired and baby fat still on his face, suddenly impaled with metal through his fine blue eyes, screaming and falling to the ground. Those who watched say nothing, only collect the child and sit him with the wounded and try to ignore his cries as they return to the walls. One man ducks under the bridge, kneeling on one level of dirt and propping his rifle on another, the wood giving him scarce cover be peers to the other side through wire and smoke. A sharp crackle, and then he slides down, returning to the men who half-watch anxiously from where they wait. One stands to high to see his companion, and falls backward with half his head missing. A scream of Rushing tears from one soldier's throat.
The clock's pale light reads 3:24am. It takes Lorna several moments to return to herself, lose the scent of smoke and the screams of horses and the shadow of clawed wire over her head. Her room is dark save for the light from her clock (she cannot sleep in the dark and come out of her nightmares so easily) She rolls over, taking her blankets with her, overheating but nervous. Apple has settled at the foot of the bed, and settling one foot against the cat's side gives enough confidence to fall asleep again. She dreams of a shark with a vertical fin and flat head catching small rays with surprising accuracy and wakes to gentle tibetan chime. She spends two hours meditating before work to clear her mind.
She will soon share a small cabin with two other members of her team, on a weeklong expedition to interpret the condition of the wrecks on the seafloor, and hopefully discover others. When she returns home she will sleep for several days and attempt to convince Apple that she is an independant cat and didn't miss her that much. She will wash her clothes and purchase tea to restock her cabinet and post on some social media site that she learned five new spanish words. She is sweetly, boringly, normal.