“What a waste,” Eleora called out through the empty house, wandering the tiles floors with only the quiet padding of her bare feet to track time. The sun was on its down slope, casting long shadows through the vaulted ceiling rooms, mostly empty. This house is too big for us.. her pen swooped ink over the pages of her journal, dotting several times as her thought lingered.
When her dad had first mentioned the move, she’d been excited. Anxious, but excited. She’d spent hours pouring over google image searches, imagining the coffee shops she would visit, the cool interesting people she would meet. The first few weeks, she’d waiting bright-eyed for an adventure to crash into her lap. After a few months, she’d gotten a sour taste in her mouth about the move all together. Call it left over teenaged angst. Her dad’s new position in the firm had him on business trips, flying here and there for a weekend every other month or so. This one was going to be a long one, leaving Thursday and not supposed to touch down until 8pm that following Sunday. She’d driven him to the airport, set their watches to the same time down to the second, their tradition, and he was gone.
Her stomach rumbled, her green eyes lifted off the page of her notebook and towards the kitchen, the lit beacon in the middle of her otherwise dark house.
Two days in and she’d eaten all the instant snacks.
The light coming in through the windows was dying quick now, everything kind of more yellow. The insides of her house would light up gold for a good twenty minutes.
She’d spent almost as long picking out her toppings as she did reading reviews on the several places that delivered to the area. The first restaurant she’d she dialed with shaking fingers, a script rehearsed in her head that she waited through several rings with anxiety bubbling in her stomach to recite, but no one ever picked up. Strange. She hung up, thumbed through the list she’d been choosing from and sought out her second favorite. It rang several times and someone hastily picked up. She started to order, but he caught her off: “No, sorry we are closing early today. Apparently, part of the city is blocked off and we can’t get through anyway. Some sort of event I guess, anyway boss said we can close early, so we out,” and the line went dead. Annoying. By the time she found a pizzeria that was A. still open and B. would take her order, she was no longer nervous to talk to the stranger who’d answered. “Eh, we’ve been kind of slow all day, so we should be out there in the next forty-five,” the man’s voice assured her before they parted ways and she was left to sit in her big, empty house, waiting for her pizza.
She lifted her remote and flipped on the television, the large screen illuminating the dark room.