Safe… safe padded rooms, and rounded furniture like sedate teddy bears. Safe, working from home, avoiding all traffic. He holed up in his safe office, in an office with padded corners, and soft fuzz-worn edges of books, lest one bite back and cut him open. Carefully controlling all interactions, and all sight, smell, taste, sound. Food was purchased online, deposited by the delivery boy he trusted. Space aged foods, in shiny safe plastic, and shiny metal cans with pictures of happy hot meals across their surfaces. Any and all nourishment derived from the cases emblazoned with sterile smiling families around a fantasy table.
Peaceful sounds, waves, and birds chirping hummed softly, constantly from speakers in the corners of each room. Up high, with the wires secured inside the walls and insulated against shock or fire. Bulbs on dimmer switches showed him dim pathways through his padded world, contributing their own soft hum to the background white noise of his life. Ideally, he wore slippers, or thick socks, to protect himself from the sudden jarring noise of his own footsteps.
A near miss, years ago, a cacophony of broken glass and twisted steel, still woke him up at night, deafening inside his mind, and the whole of the car transformed into jagged biting edges, and the oncoming lights filling the world.
He looked out the window, from behind the drapes, anxiously, eying the paper on the sidewalk. There must be a new boy throwing it, and it missed the doorstep drastically, halfway up the walk. He paced and wandered around his house, stopping to look out the window every few minutes, half convinced that the paper would find its way to the mat anyway, because that was what it was supposed to do. He paced, looked out, and stepped out of his door, looked up at the sky and was blinded by the sun, and deafened by the sound of the world alive around him.
Written from the prompt, "When you risk nothing, you risk more." I like this, if I flatter myself (and I might as well) it's a little Vonnegutian.