(Worth a Thousand Words) Don't Come Looking

Wanted to start writing again, so I looked through the photography section here to find something inspiring. This first one from @daveks grabbed my attention:

Original Post from @daveks. Please follow, and upvote, awesome photography on that account.

Don't Come Looking

by Vaughn R. Demont

The blades of grass didn’t move when she walked past, not that she expected them to. There was no whistle of the wind between the units, nothing to make the creeping cold cut through her layers like a knife, but the thought caused a reflexive eyeroll. She abhorred cliché.
There was only the sound of her breathing, a puff of vapor accompanying each exhalation to testify the time of year. The weight of the pack slowed her step, and the pap-pap-pap of her shoes on the asphalt provided a comforting rhythm. The beat recalled a tune from a few years before, which elicited an under-breath curse, though there was no one about to chide her for the profanity. It would still cause her mind to shift focus onto remembering the lyrics and fail continuously, getting her thoughts stuck in a loop.
She never liked that song, anyway.
The garages were silent as she passed, garbage cans filling a week at a time. No one was coming to pick them up, but it was nice to retain a semblance of civility. If there was one thing that might emerge from the coming darkness and dole out punishment, her money was on a homeowner’s association before a vengeful god.
The sunset was pleasant, enough to remind her that beauty still existed in all this, and that it was going to continue long after she was gone, the yellows, oranges, purples, reds, and deepening blues. The sun had vanished behind a neighboring roof, the one on the left. So it was… February? March? It meant being closer to another finished winter, widening the search radius during the day, checking dates on the canned goods, working out the math for everything that had frozen and would thaw in the coming Spring. Still, it was a beautiful sunset.
Maybe she’d write about it that night. The bathroom walls were done, but there was still a closet on the second floor that had a vacant wall. It was better than her earlier works down in the kitchen, or her experiments with poetry in the hall, that attempt at an epic retelling of the last two years in the living room that only turned out sounding like bad fanfiction.
The sole of her shoe slide along the asphalt as she grew closer to the house, the cold spot on her foot more insistent than at the beginning of the day. There was a store a ways down the road that would probably still have shoes. Food had gone quickly, most people, herself included, hadn’t thought on shoes, socks. It had all supposed to have been over in a few weeks, but…
It didn’t matter. She could load up her pack, go to the store, find some shoes, or someone who had them, find a safe place to sleep, then hike back the next day. It was a problem, there was an obvious solution, so there wasn’t anything holding her back, right?
Right.
Okay, now she needed to get inside before she started talking to herself. It was going to happen, but it wouldn’t echo behind some drywall and insulation. It didn’t do much good on nights like this, but that’s what the eight layers of sheets on her bed were for.
Once inside the house she picked up the cake servers set on the table and tapped them into the thin gap between the door and the frame. The deadbolt wasn’t any use, given that she’d busted it getting into the house in the first place, and it wasn’t like cake was in anybody’s future. The windows, of course, were avoided, and she had to make use of the dwindling light to take stock of the day’s haul.
Lantern oil, first. Then six cans of vegetables, a rare granola bar that had gone stale, but was probably still good, a deck of cards, a few vapid, self-centered, escapist celebrity magazines that were good for kindling, or an hour or so of distraction instead of her eleven millionth hand of solitaire, a tin of sardines, a box of crayons, ballpoint pen that had half its ink left, and a small paperback on over a hundred different ways to play solitaire.
The granola bar was eaten first, with a cup of water from the stash. The lack of snow was hurting her supply, but winter wasn’t finished yet. Boiling snow hadn’t been too hard to figure out, and antibiotics were still easy to find for when she made mistakes.
Maybe a can of vegetables, to keep her mouth full, and then organizing everything again. With the water growing scarce, as least for now, she’d have to rethink where to hide everything, what could be a substitute, the order in which to consume things, if serving size should be adjusted.
She’d have to make a list. Maybe two. Three, so she could compare them and decide the best course of action. The pen wouldn’t be wasted on this, the lists could be done easily enough mentally. Maybe pair the list with that damned song still stuck in her head so it could serve some kind of purpose.
All good ideas, but things to deal with tomorrow.
The lantern oil provided an hour’s worth of light to write by. Today’s handwriting would have to be new, just in case. Something scripty, maybe overdone cursive, done slowly, exacting. Someone who’d taken the time to learn and wanted people to know.
The words were written until the lantern started to dim, mostly about the beautiful shades of the sunset skies, relying on shade names from makeup ads in those trashy magazines. The person writing this would still care about those things, after all. They would be reminded of poetry, lovers taking them to museums and galleries, concerts in the park, and hope to dream of them when they slept.
It would end the same way all of the other entries did, though: I’m not safe here. Leaving in the morning. Don’t come looking.