Write to Rank 2023

Round 2 - Oops, I tripped

Prompt: Set the scene and create a dynamic dialogue. A stranger's confession leaves your character confused.

Word Count: 480(min) to 500 (max)

***

When I open my eyes, there's a man in a rubber onesie leaning over my bed. A silver bucket covers his head.

My eyes trailed over him, head to toe, before settling on the bucket. There's a slit carved into the side for him to see through.

"Hi there," the guy says. He sounds oddly cheerful, even as something explodes in the distance. 

The deep throoom vibrates my bed frame. I sit bolt upright and clutch at my blanket. Just beyond his bucketed head, there's open blue sky marred by columns of thick smoke. It blocks out the sun and darkens my town.

There is, I realize, something very wrong here. Where is the roof of my house? Where are the walls?

"I'm sorry," Buckethead says. "This is all my fault, really."

The little space around my bed is all that sits in a pile of flattened rubble. My house is gone. So were my neighbors'. The streets - disintegrated. Vehicles, people, pets, trees - there's no sign of them. Just smoke and ruins.

Another distant explosion rumbles through the neighborhood like thunder. Silence follows disturbingly in its wake.

I turn to Buckethead in a daze. "What happened?"

His shoulders droop and he steps away from the bed. A sharp zipping sound rips through the air nearby, like a bizarre sound effect from a computer game. I jump; he merely turns his head and looks toward one particular column of smoke.

"Ah," he says, as if that explains everything. "Well, then. I should probably go now."

My patience evaporates in an instant, because no. I was not doing this. Not this early in the morning, not without a cup of sanity-inducing coffee, and definitely not with a guy that failed so hard at fashion he might as well have been an alien from another world.

I lurch forward, and grab onto his arm with both hands. "Tell me! What happened to my house?"

He looks down at my hands. He sighs. Then he looks up.

When I do the same, my jaw drops. There are no words. I can't even process what I'm seeing, except that it's so enormous that the top of it is shrouded by all the smoke. Its mere shadow is big enough to cover the entire town.

My gaze traces down its human-like shape to the nearest leg, a monstrous metal thing that rests behind my bed like a metal mountain. I hadn't noticed it at first, but I sure noticed it now. And I definitely noticed the gigantic foot that had stamped out my house. My bed and the little pile of rubble sat nestled between two of its toes.

I sat back on the bed.

Buckethead shrugged. "Like I said, I'm sorry. I tried to step over your town, but I ah... tripped. Sorry. But hey, you survived, right?"

Coffee wasn't enough to fix this morning. I grabbed the blanket, pulled it over my head, and lay down.