Katherine and the Mountain of Paperwork

    What? she asked herself, where am I?  Katherine was laying on the ground, her cheek resting against something cold.  She sat up, pushing herself off the floor and rubbed her eyes.  She couldn't believe her eyes.  The walls looked like they were made of paper.  She looked down at her hands and saw that she was resting on what looked like a white, rectangular stone.
    “Excuse me,” came a voice from behind her.  “You're in the way and I've got work to do.”  Katherine looked over her shoulder pushing her brown hair over an ear.  There sitting in a black office chair was an outline of a skeleton.
    “Aah!” she screamed.  “What are you!”
    “A deadline,” it grumbled, “what are you another distraction?  Get off my desk!”  The skeleton, made of a single line, grabbed a pencil and shoved Katherine off with the eraser.  She screamed and fell in a heap.
    “Ugh,” it moaned, “more screaming.  You're one of the fear distractions are you not?” it said.  Katherine heard what sounded like a typewriter pounding away, but there wasn't one on the desk when she had opened her eyes.  Katherine grabbed the side of desk and peaked over the top.  The deadline had its feet propped up on the table and was tapping away at the metatarsals causing the toes to dent a piece of paper with ink.  She stood, shaking her head back and forth as she backed away, her eyes wide.
    “Please, go away,” the deadline grumbled, “I really don't have time for this right now.”
    A door Katherine hadn't seen opened and in walked a man in a orange pinstriped suit, a bulbous red nose, shocking blue, curly hair with a bald patch down the center, a bright pink flower on his lapel, purple suspenders, oversized green shoes, a black mug with a frowny face on it full of some steaming blue liquid, and a polka dot tie.
    “Hey, Conchita,” he drawled in a helium-tinged voice, “I'm sorry to do this to you, but-”  He stopped when he saw Katherine.  “What is that?  I thought I told you no pets?”
    The skeleton rolled her head around and looked at the clown.  “She's not my pet, Bill.  She was here when I came back from my two point  sixty-three nanosecond break.”
    “Well, get rid of it,” he drawled.  “Also, if could you work on Fudderwacken’ Day, that’d be greaat.”  The clown turned and left, his shoes squeaking with each step.
    Katherine screamed again and backed up into a pile of paperwork, which fell on her.  She flailed her arms and legs trying to get out, but the more she struggled, the more paper covered her.
    “Sigh,” the deadline got up from her desk, “I better call Phil.”
    Katherine heard a pair of heavy boots enter the office and then she was forcibly pulled out of the pile.
    “Doc, what's wrong with her?” the skeleton deadline asked what looked like a giant red pen with arms.
    “Alas, she is delirious,” it said.  “We must dunk her in chocolate before she goes mad.”
    “Do you really think that necessary?” asked the deadline.  “She's just a distraction.”
    “Of course."
    “Hmm, then what should we dunk her in?” the skeleton asked.  “Lindt? Ghiraerdelli? Toblerone? Willy Wonka? Nothing but the best quality I assume!”
    “Nothing less than Belgian dark, darling, 73% minimum, is what I recommend.”
    “I have some 90% Lindt in my stash that we could melt down. Wait.  Is she addicted to chocolate?  Are you sure it would help?”
   “Yes.  I think the chocolate would help her sanity, immensely,” said the pen.
   “Wait, where did she go?”demanded the deadline.  
    The two looked around, but Katherine had borrowed her way out of the room.  The dunking in chocolate had sounded divine, until they mentioned melting it.  Seething chocolate all over?  No way.
    Frantic, she dug with both hands, kicking the displaced waste paper behind her with her feet until she burst through the ground scaring a family of caramel squirrels which were having a picnic.  They were so scared they left little piles of chocolate-covered raisins in their wakes.
    “Oh, just brillancy,” came a voice above.  Katherine looked up to see a smile without a face on a branch dangling candied and caramel apples.  She screamed.
    “Sorry, did not mean to frighten you,” the smile said.  Slowly a blue tabby cat materialized on the branch.  “Hello, are you a mole?”
    “I'm,” she swallowed, “Katherine.”
    “A cat you say?” the smiling cat disappeared and reappeared at the base of the tree it sat in.  “What are you doing in the ground my dear?”
    “A red pen and a deadline wanted to dunk me in hot chocolate.”  Katherine extricated herself from the hole and wiped discarded letters off her blue dress.
    “Hmm, that sounds like something the Hatter would say.  Why did they want to do that?”
    “They thought I was going mad,” Katherine said, wondering why she was talking to a cat.
    “‘If men were all to become even uniformly mad, they might agree tolerably well with each other.’  A bit of bacon said that to me the other day,” said the cat as he proceeded to clean himself.  “Then I ate him.”
    “Are you the Cheshire Cat?” she asked.
    “What?  Don't be absurd,” the cat growled.  “I look nothing like him.  Chesh is grey or purple.  I am blue.  Now then my dear back to this chocolate business.  Would being dunked in chocolate be a bad thing?”
    “They had to melt it first,” she said defensively.  “I don't want to be burnt.”
    “Burnt?” he scoffed.  “You would be chocolate-covered, and therefore delicious.”
    “What?”
    “Look, I had a friend once.  She was sitting on the Edge of Insanity so I pushed her over the ledge for a chocolate bath down below.”  The cat got off its haunches and started to slowly pad its way around Katherine.  “As only a true friend would.  Alas, she got away.”
    “You tried to eat your friend?” Katherine asked while backing away.  Her hand touched something and she glanced down.  She had backed into a field of sour straw grass.  She pulled up a bunch and held it behind her.
    “Eat?” the cat laughed and grew into something looking like a blue tiger.  “No, savor, devour, feast.  Eat is too cosmopolitan a word for her.  And oh, covered in chocolate.  Hmmm … chocolate …”  The cat was now drooling, leaving silvery trails across the waste paper field.
    From behind the cat, a door into the ground opened up and out marched a closet of office supplies.  The clown in the suit spotted her.
    “There she is,” came his helium voice.  “Grab her and dunk her in chocolate!”
    “Mmmm, sounds yummy!” agreed the cat and then pounced.
    Katherine swat the big, blue cat with the sour straws and dove into the tall grass.  She ran until she felt like her lungs would burst stopping only when she came upon a clearing.  Looking around she saw a red-and-white-striped stump.  She hobbled over and sat down hard.
    “What is going on?” she asked no one in particular.  “One minute I'm relaxing at my computer posting my mini-magnet masterpiece, the next minute I'm running from office supplies and a homicidal, shape-shifting, blue tabby cat?!  What's next?”
    A whistling and grass breaking caught her attention and suddenly a little, bare-chested, barefoot, orange man with green hair and worn out, dirty white coveralls stepped out of the grass.  She screamed.  He screamed.  We all scream for ice cream.
    “Who are you?!” he said, holding what looked like a giant Swedish fish on the end of a spear in her face.
    “Katherine!”  She held her hands up.  The man was only as tall as she was while sitting on the stump.
    “Are you with the man in the purple suit?  Why are you sitting on my peppermint tree stump?”  He waved the fish-covered spearhead inches from her nose.
    “No!” she denied, “and I'm tired.”
    “Tired?”  He lowered the spear, resting its butt on the ground.  “Of what?”
    “I'm running from people who are trying to dunk me in chocolate.”
    The little man paled.  “Oh no, it's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory all over again,” he mumbled.
    “What?” she said, lowering her hands.  “I didn’t catch that.”
    “Rolos,” he swore.  “Just some Willy Wonka type stuff.  Come on, follow me.  I'll help you.”  The little man walked into the grass, the tip of his spear the only thing Katherine could see.
    “Wait up,” she called.  The spear stopped and he turned around as she caught up.  “What's your name anyway?”
    “Oh, where are my manners,” he exclaimed and started patting his pockets.  “Ah, here they are.”  He pulled out a long, silver flask from his front coverall pocket, opened it and took a swig.  “I'm No-One N. Particular.  You can call me Parti.”
    “Nice to meet you Parti, I'm Katherine,” she said holding out her hand.
    “Humph,” he turned and continued on.  “The manners brew doesn't last that long.  Come on.”
    They walked through the grass for hours, seeming to only go in circles.  Which was confirmed when they came back to the peppermint tree stump in the clearing.
    “Ah, here we are,” Parti said with joy and climbed onto the stump.
    “This is where we started!” Katherine shouted.
    “No it ain't,” Parti retorted.  “It is where we were going.  Now where did I put that key?”
    “We walked for hours without you saying a single word, just munching on that damn fish, and we come right back to where I was sitting?!”
    “Hmm, maybe you are going mad,” he said his back turned as he felt the air above the stump.
    “Mad?  You think I'm going mad!  I am mad!"  Katherine's face turned a deep red and she stomped the ground with her foot.  Strangely the ground sounded hollow.  She looked down at her feet.
    “Oh.  Then,” he stopped searching and grabbed an invisible something, “you'll need this.”  He pulled down and the ground dropped out from underneath Katherine.
    Katherine scrambled for something to grab onto.  The walls of the pit she was falling into seemed to be made of Oreos, big chucks of chocolate cookie and white … stuff … breaking off the wall and crumbling into her hair.  Luckily she was able to grab what felt like  metal and she hung suspended over a pit.  The smell of freshly brewed hot chocolate with little mini marshmallows drifted up to her.  Her mouth watered.  She looked down.  Several feet beneath her bubbled a gigantic mug of the most delicious smelling cocco she had ever smelled.
    “Funny to see you here,” came a voice above her.  She looked up and there on the metal she had grabbed was a paper clip with floating eyes like that thing in the word program.  “Can I help you?” it asked.
    “Can you get me safely down?” Katherine asked.  “There are people trying to boil me down there.”
    As if on cue Deadline stepped into view.  “Where is she?” she asked no one in particular.
    “I don't know,” said the little man as he stepped forward and poked the fire under the mug with his spear.  “She should have dropped in by now.”
    “I bet she will taste delicious,” purred the blue cat, now a normal size.
    “No one asked for your opinion cat!” screamed Deadline.
    “No, I didn't,” said Parti.  “I didn't ask him anything.”
   “Ugh!”  Deadline walked where Katherine couldn't see her.  “Many people would be fine with a dunk in the chocolate, but not her!”
    “Throw me in chocolate please,” said a new voice as two strawberries bounced into view.
    “Me too,” chimed a second looking quite fierce.
    “Sorry,” said Parti.  “This is the wrong kind of chocolate.”
    “Ah, man,” the two strawberries moaned and bounced away, their leaves drooping.
    “I'd love someone to dunk me in chocolate next time I'm feeling overwhelmed,” purred a one-eyed black and white tabby as it padded into view.  It sat next to the blue cat and started cleaning itself.
    “You're truly great!” said the paper clip.  Katherine felt her hands vibrate.  She looked up to see that the paper clip had transformed itself into wire woodpecker and was hammering its head into Katherine's hand hold.
    “What are you doing?” she hissed through her teeth.
    The paper clip stopped and looked at her, it's head cocked to the side.  “Helping you down,” it said as went back to pecking.
    “Stop!” she cried.  “I'm feeling better!  I'm not going mad!”
    “What does that have to do with anything?”  The paper clip stopped pecking and looked at her again.
    “They wanted to dunk me because they thought I was going crazy.”
    “It was once said ‘sanity/ perseverance/ enhanced/ ...by sweet/ ness/ candied sanity.’”  It quoted.
    “What?”
    “Down you go!”  The paper clip bit through the wire and Katherine fell.

    She awoke with a start, sat up, and stared at her computer monitor.  A paper clip that was stuck to her face fell and chimed against her desk.
    “I have got to stop staying up so late with these,” she said and she shuffled off to bed.  The paper clip turned back into a bird and flew into her computer screen.