Paint the Town

sunshine

The thunder had woken Lizzie up three minutes before her alarm.

She lied in bed, listening to the heavy beating of the rain, bracing for the blare of her alarm to shatter her peace. The familiar beeping noise never came, and soon she became restless, clenching her toes and shifting her body around in the soft sheets, but nothing.

Deciding that she could not take the waiting game anymore, Lizzie threw her legs over the side of her bed and broke through the bathroom door. With the flip of the switch, she was blind. A flash of bright white light burned to her retinas and she squeezed her eyes shut with a groan.

She always hated those bathroom lights. Large beams hanging from all sides of the mirror, bathing every corner of the room in bright white light. Perfect for doing makeup, but irritating when all she wanted to do was brush her teeth. They were just so damn bright.

"Better to see your beautiful face with, my dear."

"Who are you? The big bad wolf?"

"That would make you... Little Red?"

Lizzie could still feel his fingers twirling her hair.

She threw it into a bun.

Her teeth brushed and bladder emptied, she walked into her closet to slip into her favorite pair of stretchy jeans. She thought the closet felt much bigger now that it was nearly empty, as she threw an olive green t shirt decorated with small dinosaurs over her head. To finish off the outfit, she slid on matching dinosaur socks, and pulled them over the ends of her jeans.

When she walked out of the bedroom, she nearly tripped on an object; a box she had carelessly left in the hardwood hallway. With the lights off and the darkness of the outside, she could not see any of the boxes for that matter. But when she pressed the button, the lights came on, and there they were: large, bulky, brown boxes, littering the floor space of the large apartment, and contrasting with the icy grey walls. The boxes were like monsters—or buildings— making a tiny village out of the rest of the furniture, rising so high to touch the light fixtures hanging from the ceiling. Some of them were newer than others and crisper at the edges, a result of Lizzie's multiple trips to the hardware store to buy more after thinking she had enough, and all of them were explicitly marked.

2. Kitchenware
7. Books and Shelf Stuff
9. Picture Frames (DELICATE!)

Then there were the boxes far in the corner by the window, whose labels she could not read from where she stood, outside of the bedroom door. And she did that purposefully, writing them in big ugly letters, then facing them towards the wall so she did not have to look at them. Last thing she needed every morning was a reminder, but then again, the boxes themselves were a reminder that, soon enough, she'd be out on her ass. But she tried not to think about that too much. At least not yet.

As she scurried through the box maze that was her apartment, she heard something fall into the kitchen sink, followed by an ear grating meow of a disgruntled cat. Lizzie did not stop moving, making a beeline for the shoe rack and simply shouting, "Brando! Get out of the kitchen!" She stepped into her yellow rain boots and red raincoat before grabbing her purse and fleeing the apartment, muttering under her breath, "Stupid cat."

The drive to the diner was short but grueling. Her windshield wipers worked over time as she rolled along, the radio playing at an almost inaudible volume; she had turned it down in order to see better.

Keller was only a town over, but driving down the mountain that her place was perched upon was never fun, especially not in the rain. There had never been any instances of anyone rolling down the road and crashing at the bottom, and Lizzie was not going to be the first.