Do you ever catch yourself staring at a picture, a painting or even a person and wondering what their story is. Piecing together a fantastical fabrication with your words. Well, the thought has crossed our minds, many times. Telling stories is one of the deeply embedded values of Gather.ly and we love to see creatives collaborating and being inspired by one another. For this creative challenge, the lovely photographer Cleo Glover provided us with a series of images to inspire Katie Oldham, a wonder with words and her imagination, to interpret and weave into a story - for you. The only rule was a 1,000 word limit. The rest was in Katie's hands.

The small bespectacled man behind the counter surveyed the woman with a wary squint, which seemed to nestle just above his blooming moustache.

She wore a sharp suit with a fine pinstripe, greying blonde hair coiffed immaculately into a chignon. Not the usual type that frequented his age-old thrift store. From what his myopia would allow him to gather, the lanyard around her neck indicated she'd come from from the NYU campus around the block, maybe a Law Professor or Fellow.

“You okay lady?” He decided to interject, startling the woman who flinched a little in response to his invading tone. There was a wildness about her eyes and a hesitance about her step as if she'd just discovered some dark secret of the universe in the rails of beat up leather jackets and hand me down shirts.

“Where...” She began in a whisper, eyes sparkling with something between wonder and woe, “...Did you get this?” She placed a small leather satchel with a missing fastener on the counter top.

“Look I'm sorry, this stuff comes in from everywhere...” His accent was thick with a Chicago inheritance. “Why, you want it? 18 bucks, but for you I'll do 15.”

She gave a slight shake of the head and with a deep breath, she opened the top of the bag.

She reached into it's mahogany depths and from a discreet and concealed inside pocket, retrieved something. She laid them out on the counter. Seven crumpled 35mm photographs.

She'd been just a child.

The Midwestern summer was long and had grown tiresome to a soul like hers. The shimmering heat dragged endlessly through the days and nights, unrelenting with the exception of maybe one brief hour of relief between the hours of 2 and 3am.

Toward the end of July, an uncharacteristically cool morning bought with it a sacred breeze and five kids in a rusted old Chevrolet 150. She first saw them through the condensated windows of the gas station where she'd worked part time for some extra cash that she had neither the friends, the free time or the need to spend.

There was something about these kids that was simply glowing, exuberant from effervescent youth a far cry from the sallow mediocrity and hopelessness of her own pallid skin.

They bundled in with fervour and delight, poring over the aisles of tinned food, suspect-looking baked goods and various automobile accessories.

A boy and a girl approached the counter to pay for gas, both with icy bleach blonde locks and sparkling electric blue eyes. They might have been lovers, they might have been siblings, they mightn't have even been human. There was something about them, as with them all, which was simply bewitching.

They returned every other day or so, and she found herself brimming with excitement when she heard their battered old car screeching into the forecourt. She grew to look forward to them, to envy them, to love them even, as they still remained but strangers.

But one particular morning, the ever-persistent sun beating down with such brute force that even the air conditioning rattled and groaned in protest, she'd been silently and pensively restocking the bags of trail mix when an icy hand slipped around her cheek and clamped down hard on her mouth.

Adrenaline surged through her every nerve and synapse, but before she could even begin to panic, she was whirled around on the spot to be greeted by those five familiar faces, the white blonde boy at the front, slowly removing his hand from her face.

“We leave today.” Their expressions were forlorn but somewhat mischievous. “We're going to ask you this once, and once only, and then we'll leave forever. So listen carefully.”

She nodded silently, thinking of her supervisor snoring in the back room.

“Here's the thing.” The blonde girl interrupted. “We've got one spare seat...” They all began to smile. “Don't think. Just come with us.”

Right up to the day when she stood in that thrift store, gazing at those photographs with tears in her eyes, she didn't know why she did it. But at that moment, a primal part of her which so longed for adventure and experience that had been kept hidden away for her entire sheltered life, exploded into being, grabbed her paycheck from the office and jumped into the car.

That summer was heaven on earth.

They spent weeks on the road, travelling from state to state, living by their means and busking on the streets with an old, tuneless guitar when they needed the extra cash.

The cities and days whirled past in a hypnotic maelstrom of laughter, exploration and adventure. She grew to love them, and they her, and at times when they were camped out in the desert beneath galaxies, or running breathlessly through the streets from enraged shop owners they'd just stolen a bag of oranges from, she realised if she died tomorrow, she knew she would not have lived her life in vain.

“You okay lady?” The man behind the counter repeated, but more softly this time. The woman held the photographs in shaking hands, tears spilling freely down her pale cheeks.

Because as with the heat, as with the season, at some point it all had to end, and with a changing of the leaves that signified Fall creeping ever closer, she knew her time was up. She returned to her town, she returned to school, and the last she ever saw of them was their expressionless faces pressed up against the windows of the Chevvy as it roared out of town for the very last time.

It was a couple of hours beyond the state line when they discovered she'd left behind her camera, stashed in the glove compartment.

“It's okay,” Said the white-haired girl to the others. “I'll keep it safe, until our paths cross again.” As she placed it safely inside her little brown satchel with a missing fastener.

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We would like to say a huge thanks to Cleo and Katie for being involved in our very first A Thousand Words challenge. We'll be continuing with this series, so if you are a photographer or writer and want to be involved, make sure to get in touch!

Check out more of Katie's writing here and get lost in Cleo's beautiful photography here.