Hunting For Loneliness

She picked mindlessly at the already frayed skin hugging her fingernail until it bled. Lorna looked at the blood, bright against her anemic skin, and then shoved it into a pocket. It could bleed there. She didn't need more eyes on her.

More judgemental eyes, at least.

Lorna sighed and turned big round eyes, perpetually touched by sleepless nights and sorrow, up to the grainy sky. There was supposed to be a meteor shower. That was the rumour, at least. Bleak eyes roamed the bleak skies, dirtied by small amounts of light pollution. It wasn't normally this fuzzy at one in the morning, especially not during winter but it was today. Par for the course.

If there were shooting stars, she was going to miss them.

Just another way to make fun of me and my luck, she thought plucking a frozen leaf from the side of her ratty shoe. She blinked down at the worn sneakers. Should have gotten new ones last season. Before the cold kicked in. Lorna looked back up to the sky. She had been too preoccupied with her pain to think about shoes.

Again.

That was the way of things, she thought dismally, petting the frozen tips of dried grass. Someone at some point had slipped a collar of bad luck around her neck and thrown away the key, if there had ever been one. The pain was an ever-present force in her life. For years, she had tried to untangle the reason why everyone treated her like dirt, why they felt compelled to hurt her, why they had to prune her each time she grew, but there were no answers to be found.

The people in her life were needlessly cruel.

And that was before the end of the world.

Lorna plucked an old stick from the ground, holding it up to the filtered light making its way over from the motel. Bloody. So someone had died here after all. The bloody stick went dim in her eyes as a heavy fog rolled in, blotting out the pale motel porch light. She slipped the twig into her pocket, the one already stained with red from her torn cuticles.

A pocket full of blood and a heart full of nothing, she mused as she stood up and brushed off the debris from her pants.

She walked up to a collection of small, aging oaks and gave them a pat. Of all the things here, she would miss this the most. Quietly, she stepped around the largest oak, picked up the duffel bag she had stashed there, and swung it over her shoulder.

The sad eyes fell on a nearby pickup truck on its fourth generation of opossum.

She had been at this motel for a long time now, years. She had watched all the seasons come and go several times over, hoping for something to change. It never did. Not for the better.

The group she was stuck with, her own family, would rather peel little pieces of her away and burn them over the fire of their hatred than admit it. Admission meant change. Lorna suspected these people liked the game of hurting her too much to let it go.

It had always been that way. Since she was a child.

She tugged the hood of her jacket up and set off into the fog without a backward glance at the motel, remembering the days when the apocalypse had excited her.

There had been a brief moment as her family shoved everything into bags and rushed her out the door with tears in their eyes where she thought it would change. That this apocalypse could be a good thing for them. Whoever had set that nasty billionaire's house ablaze and released that chemical, toxic to most but not all, had been her hero. For a while at least.

Things had even changed. For a few days.

It slipped back into habitual hatred before she could even enjoy the affection, fake as it was.

Lorna shoved her hands in her pockets and forcibly swallowed the growing lump in her throat. Those precious moments of hope made her stomach flip like a dying fish seeking water. It had been nothing but a pipe dream and the pipe had blown.

Hate wasn't something she could change and she had been stupid to ever try.

Whatever hope she had for being loved, respected, important, left with the smoke from that blaze.

She still silently thanked whoever had set the fire. If they hadn't, she would have never had the resources or money to leave. In this world, all she needed now were her feet, some snacks, and a decent sense of hunting and food growing.

The duffel bag shifted on her shoulders.

They wouldn't even miss her. They would only miss their precious punching bag.

Lorna swept the feeling of despair aside as easily as a cobweb lingering in the shadow of a vacated home. It didn't matter and it never had. She was alone now. And that was what mattered.

She inhaled deeply, sucking in the faint smell of petrichor and the overwhelming scent of rusting metal. The cars were all deteriorating, generating little piles of red and brown as they went to earth along the highway.

In a strange way, it comforted her to know that even the powerful things, the things she could not break or twist or hurt with her own hands could dissolve and fade away. It made the flesh-and-bone memories of her own family feel weak. Impermanent.

What a high that was.

Lorna stopped at a silver sedan, emptied of all its contents, and turned around.

A pink pig waved goodbye. She swallowed around a knot of sorrow in her throat and raised her hand.

"Bye, Mr. Ham. You've been great." The duffel suddenly felt heavy with all the items she'd taken from the store over the past months. "Thank you. For everything. Maybe I'll see you again someday."

Mr. Ham, the porky little pig, blurred in her vision as tears pricked her eyes. He had been good to her at least. That store... She had spent most of her free time there. Enjoying the loneliness. Enjoying the time away from people who claimed to love her.

Sighing heavily, she shoved her hand back in her pocket and trailed down the highway to her next destination.

The fog was thick, isolating her even more.

She couldn't see the trees past the banked highway. Couldn't hear the river that ran parallel. Couldn't even see half of the cars until she was on top of them. Lorna could only see the faded yellow lines and the reflective markers stretching a few feet ahead.

She walked well into the night, disappearing deeper into the fog.

It was quiet.

Crushingly so.

The pressure soothed all the little broken pieces in her chest and for the first time, she could breathe. The breaths started as little nervous puffs. The absence of tight anger cinching around her ribcage was an immediate relief. But soon the little puffs had turned into something else as the oppressive touch of her family left her.

They turned into great gasping sobs that she could not control.

Lorna staggered off an exit and stumbled her way aimlessly east, toward the brightening horizon. Her vision prickled with the lack of oxygen making its way into her lungs. She was alone.

There was no moon. No voice around her. No sun. Nothing. There was only the delicate embrace of the fog.

Lorna slipped into an open house, a small little cottage with a crooked design and a big wooden door. Uninhabited. There was hardly even a mess. The dishes were neatly put away. The fridge emptied and off. Everything was clean. It was as though the house hadn't even been occupied before the crash.

She barely gave it notice before dropping her duffel bag and collapsing in what appeared to be the sitting room.

The strange gasping sobs broke down further and she cried violently until there were no tears left and a thin, reedy fog had infiltrated the house through the open door.

There wasn't a soul around her. Not a soul to punish her. Not a soul to scream. She could mourn, she could laugh, she could sob and her family would be none the wiser. There would be no punishment for this. No punishment for emotions.

She could finally live (and die) perfectly alone.

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This is a sister piece/companion story to "Eli Died Alone" linked below. There's something really comfortable about writing in this universe. Everything is grey and dismal. Flat. The words are a bit boring and there isn't much of anything other than dismal loneliness. I think I'd like to write more about this place in the future.