On a sunny Saturday morning, I went down to the dining table to have my breakfast. Everything was as usual, my mum was cooking eggs and sausages. Father was reading the newspaper and my brother was playing on his PS4.

I sat on my chair and picked up the children’s magazine. It had a long story about a boy who sat on a wasp, got bitten and as a result he got the power to fly. My brother snorted at the idea of having superpowers. I stared at him disbelievingly and wondered if I was the only imaginative soul in the house.

It was still morning and I had nothing to do, so with an empty head, I started doing silly things. I kept teasing my brother, to which he called mum who sent me outside because of my strange behaviour.

I went out in the garden and saw a wasp and decided to do the same experiment as I read it in the story. The wasp, after hovering around, sat on the chair in our lawn, so I rushed to sit on it. Nothing happened except when I got up, this angry little fellow, the wasp, bit me on my hand.

So in a matter of a few seconds, the poison got into me and I felt woozy. I called for my mum and she took me to my room.

“Alina! Why did you do this?” mum said as she gave me an ‘answer-me-right-now’ look! I looked at her meekly and sighed, and told her that I did it because I wanted to check if I would get some superpower as well.

“Superpower?” she looked at me and chuckled. “You have an over imaginative brain just like your dad. It was just a fictional story, my dear!” she kissed me on my forehead and left the room.

I slept and when I woke up, I felt as if the air was carrying me.

“Huh?” I looked into the mirror and shrieked. I was floating in mid-air! My shriek must have caught my parents’ attention as I heard thumping of their feet.

Somehow I made my way down to my bed and covered myself with a quilt. When my parents came in I assured them it was just a bad dream and so they left. But on the back of my mind, I could hear a distant voice calling to me, “Alllinnaaa! Wake up!” I jerked up and saw my mum’s face startled. “Mum?” I said.

“Come on now, you’ve been sleeping for a while now, come down for lunch.”

I looked at her, confused at what was happening. “Mum... did a wasp bite me today?” I asked a bit confused.

She looked at me as if I’d banged my head somewhere. “Huh? No honey. You just woke up.”

That was when I realised that it was all a dream. So I got up and when I picked my dupatta, I saw that it had a squashed wasp stuck to it.

Published in Dawn, Young World, May 13th, 2017