[WP] How many shoes?

Another day of grey skies, broken by lancing shafts of sunlight.
The garden was doing much better this year; there had been little snow this summer - only a dusting and she'd rescued the tomatoes before they'd been nipped by the frost. On good days like this she could sometimes shrug off her layers of coats and feel the breath of the chilly wind on her fragile skin.
It reminded her of when she was a child, so long ago.
The warmth also mean that today was a good day to walk down to the beach and pick through all the things that had washed up in the last month or so, while she had huddled inside her glass house, tending to the plants and looking through all the old picture books.
Once, her father had said, the beaches were golden and the sun shone all day. She thought she could remember a trip to the beach as a child, but they were black and grey, peppered with coloured fragments of plastic and glass.
Picking her way carefully up the path that led to the beach she looked out over the grey seas as she crested the top of the hill that sheltered her little warm valley. Ice floes bobbed and a majestic, dirty grey iceberg jutted on the horizon; the rest of the heaving, rolling swell was peppered with the junk of a thousand generations of human beings, the colours still bright and artificial from the lack of genuine sunlight.
The old railing her father had built was still sturdy despite fifty years of corrosive air and extreme temperatures and she now relied on it to ease her tired body down to the beach.
One she was down the treacherous, icy path she hobbled along the beach of coloured fragments, plastic junk and corroded metal. A pair of sickly looking penguin pups honked at her as she scanned the mile-long swathe of broken down sea-junk for whole and useful items. She had no food for the pups this time, she didn't have the energy to spare in bringing them any of her precious supplies.
Disappointed, the pups waddled out to the waves and vanished under the water's skin of floating garbage, deftly avoiding being snared in tangles of brittle nylon and ducking under floes of filthy Styrofoam.
She wondered how many other creatures were still alive out there. When she was small, she had a cat, she knew. But the memory didn't match up to the pictures in the books she had, where the cats had smooth, bold stripes and human-like grins, their speech-bubbles filled with adult words, of which she only remembered a few. The cat she distantly recalled was soft and hairy and smelled like outside. It had scary fangs and it didn't talk at all.
She spent three hours picking her way up the beach and back again, filling her patchwork sack with little bits and things that caught her eye.
Some of them were useful, but some were just pretty and small enough not to burden her.
And there was always room for shoes.
Before they came to the island mother had a whole room filled with clothes and shoes and even now she remembered the combined smells of plastic and leather, combining into a scent that was purely mother. And so, whenever she saw a lonely shoe on the beach, she would eagerly stuff it into her bag and take it back to her collection in the glass house.
How many shoes did she have now? She wasn't sure; but not one of them matched. Hundreds of shoes of all kinds; ones with jewels, ones with laces, ones with long, dagger-like heels. Every time she found a new one, she hoped that it would be the shoe that would finally make a pair.
By the time she had hauled herself back up the path and reached home, firstdark had settled and she welcomed the warm air inside the glass house, pulling the great shutters over the roof with the mechanical winch that squealed in protest, badly in need of oil.
Under the glass house was her room and she descended the stairs, the wan light of the three LEDs guiding her down. With the increase in sunlight they burned a little longer each night and this made her happy. Maybe one day she'd be able to look at her picture books through the whole of the dark winter.
Three shoes she'd found today. In memory of her mother she'd built a side room filled with just shoes and as she limped inside to deposit her new additions, the smell of old leather greeted her and flung her back to when she was small.
None of the shoes matched any of the others, but she faithfully sorted them by shape, colour and texture.
One day she would have a matching pair, she just had to keep looking.
Satisfied with their place, she closed the plastic-beaded curtain to the wardrobe and made her way over to her cache. Tonight she might finally eat one of the four remaining squares of chocolate she'd been hoarding. It felt like the right night to do it.

/r/WritingPrompts Thread