Introducing Rayon, the newest dust bunny

got the morning wrong. He looked outside, saw snow heaped in piles, and dressed to keep warm. Somehow, though, Josh hadn’t taken into account a blue sky full of accompanying sunshine. So, when he did step outside to leave for his friend Andrew’s house, Josh was braced for a sharp, snowball-to-the-face kind of cold. 

A small and as-yet-still-insignificant ball of blue hat fluff, blue as the sky outside, was cast adrift into mid-air and the arms of gravity.

He was welcomed instead by a big warm smooch from an early springtime sun and an engulfing embrace of soft air. As he trudged through and around the melting snow piles on his way to Andrew’s house, Josh - whether through laziness or a keen lack of situational awareness - kept his favourite hat pulled down tight and his jacket done up snug while this unexpected gift of solar warmth sneaked through his winter wear and warmed his bones. 

By the time he reached Andrew’s house, Josh was over-heating vigourously. Red-faced, soggy, sweaty but only slightly whiffy, Josh bellowed his hellos to Andrew’s mum and the pair of them plodded upstairs to the sanctuary of Andrew’s room. Josh tugging at the zip of his jacket to let the steam out.

Flopping down on the bed in Andrew’s room, Josh pulled at the slightly soggy hat clinging to his very sweaty head. This rough handling of the well-worn and grimy outer edges of Josh’s hat finally severed the last remaining thread anchoring a small, tightly-coiled bundle of fibres to the fabric of the hat. As this thread broke and recoiled back into its native warp and weft, a small and as-yet-still-insignificant ball of blue hat fluff, blue as the sky outside, was cast adrift into mid-air and the arms of gravity.

That ball of blue hat fluff was Rayon - named, as all dust bunnies are at first after the thread of which it was made.

As Rayon tumbled backwards into the void, he saw for the very first time in his manufactured existence the hat of which, until that very instant, had been his home. The hat from whence he came was still clinging tenaciously to a large hairy lump of a thing currently making nnnh nnnh noises. The hat and its grunting contents were sitting atop a larger formless mass, the limbs of which were tugging at the hat energetically, but not very productively.

Ohhh, thought Rayon, his view expanding as he fell, so that’s The Josh. I’ve only ever seen his spotty neck. And look, there’s the other one, just like him.

This, Rayon knew, was The Andrew, The Josh’s friend, and this must be the place where the bigger lumps (who tended and fed The Andrew) kept him when the bright went away. Hat finally off, The Josh now wrestled his way out of a jacket that fought back with a damp and clammy tenacity. All this sleeve-flapping engendered localised turbulence that wafted Rayon upwards, practically to the ceiling, higher than the light bulb, and flipped him over so he could see what lay below.

Around the top of the light bulb, where nobody ever looked and only the lightest and most delicate of fluff ever reached, lacey clusters of pristine white, almost luminous light bulb dust bunnies watched Rayon’s slow trajectory. They politely cheered and waved as he floated past, so Rayon waved a thread or two back as a show of good manners.

With his trajectory peaking at the lightshade, Rayon started his descent. This was not a gut-wrenching, unstoppable-meteoric-plunge kind of fall, with a thud or a bang at the end, because dust bunnies are too flimsy for that kind of ballistic tomfoolery except when wet. Instead, Rayon descended from the ceiling in a relaxed, spiralling, bobbing meander aided and assisted by the last of The Josh’s wafts and up-draughts.

A few random but persistent vortices tugged at Rayon. Even while dwindling in strength, these mean little twists of air threatened to take Rayon spiralling down in ever decreasing circles to the bottom of a well of still air, somewhere over-looked, over-crowded and dismally uninteresting. A sad, back-of-a-desk, behind-a-filing-cabinet kind of place.

But The Wind was kind to Rayon this time. The Andrew, recoiling violently from the sudden release of fresh, warm Josh fumes, stirred up a swirl, drawing Rayon back from the boundary layers where the vortices lurked, and back into the major currents, right back into the swim of things.

Oblivious to his good fortune, Rayon floated aroundwards and downwards, scanning the room from horizon to horizon, his dust bunny instincts assessing his new surroundings. So, lightshade, walls, ceiling, floor. Definitely indoors then. Bonus. No wind, no rain, low UV - that’s an improvement.

Rayon read the signs of a lingering untidiness all around him. Up here, at the higher altitudes, Rayon drifted past cliff faces stacked with shelving; ledges laden to overspill with jagged drifts of shining, almost luminous displays of fractured shapes and colour. These were The Andrew’s abandoned toys - the defunct, the scuffed, the cracked, the deliberately mutilated and the no-longer coveted. There were mounds of bright plastic parts, long separated from their kin, scattered bits of puzzles and games liberated from their boxes and random, torn pages of badly-drawn and badly-coloured-in pictures submerged under logjams of desiccated felt pens, pointless pencils and crumbling crayons.

Looking down, Rayon saw a vast, sprawling delta of messiness reaching to the walls, a morass of unsorted clothes, underwear best left undescribed, orphaned socks, escaping T-shirts and badly-behaved bedsheets.

Lovely, thought Rayon as he surveyed the slowly approaching floor, or what little he could see of it. Barely a hint of tidiness to be seen. I think I’ll like it here.

Below him, The Josh and The Andrew had stopped stirring up the atmosphere and settled on the bed in order to ignore each other while playing games that go ‘beep’.

Rayon landed with barely a buckled thread, alone in a wasteland of slightly grimy beige carpet far from everything. It may have been just a regular-sized bedroom, but to Rayon, down there on the floor, it was a vast, sprawling and towering cavern, a cave so big you’d get very tired running towards any one of the walls.

Looking up from the middle of it all, the lightshade he’d floated past earlier seemed as far away to him now as the sun was when he was outside. High up, the walls were papered with vivid rectangular patches of colour overlaid with some kind of scribbling that looked as if it meant something. To his right was the bed, thrust out into the room, unscalable, massive. It made him dizzy when he tried to tilt back a bit to see the top of its towering solidity. High like the clouds, big like a continent.

Ahead, lofty elegant chair legs soared upwards to prop up sprawling wooden platforms that seemed to be collection points for the clothes that dangled over the seat edges in long, swooshing drapes and swathes; waterfalls and ocean waves of fabric that looked, to Rayon, about to fall to the floor at any minute. To his left, a mountainside of open drawers seemed to cast the deepest, longest, most secure-looking shadows. However, the bed was closer, so Rayon heaved a sigh, gave a puff and started rolling, wondering if the natives would be friendly.

As Rayon came to a rest closer to the bed, a mostly white-ish dot shot out from the shadows under the bed with a cross squeak, bounced twice and started to roll towards him. Rayon considered it rude to simply stand there, so he started rolling again, too. As the slightly white dust bunny rolled closer and closer, Rayon noticed a strange sensation that was making his fibres tingle madly and stand on end. A few more revolutions later and he had just enough time to think Wa! Hoo! Ah! before he was plucked by forces beyond his control to find himself clinging to the blonde, ivory and white threads of a startled, indignant and very-much-less-than-happy blonde dust bunny.

While their fibres weren’t exactly what could be described in polite company as ‘entwined’, they were so close enough together it would be hard to tell the difference without a magnifying glass. They were practically mingling and without so much as a proper introduction.

‘Sorry. Static electricity,’ spluttered Rayon after he found where he’d left his senses.

‘You don’t have to hold on quite so tight, you know.’

‘Sorry, can’t help it. You are very attractive.’

‘I’m told I have loose electrons,’ said the dust bunny, trying unsuccessfully to peel herself from Rayon. As soon as she got one of her threads loose, it just whipped over to cling to another of Rayon’s.

‘Electrons! Were there sparks?’

‘Not for me.’ She gave up struggling against Rayon’s persistent clinging. ‘Knickers.’

‘Well, I’m not too pleased about this myself.’

‘No. Me, you fuzzball. Knickers.’

‘Rayon. Ex-hat. Treated cellulose. Recently entangled. Pleased to meet you.’

‘Is a name?’ tried Rayon.

‘Correct. Gusset stitching, pearlescent lacey trim and elastic. You?’

‘Rayon. Ex-hat. Treated cellulose. Recently entangled. Pleased to meet you.’

‘You must come with me to somewhere less visible.’

‘But I only just got here.’

‘You’re very bright and yet dim at the same time, aren’t you? You are so blue. If this room didn’t have a lid on it, you could be seen from space. Come on, puff and aim for the bed.’ Knickers tutted. ‘It’ll take ages to get us tweezed apart. I hate being tweezed.’

‘Why you?’ asked Rayon as they rolled in the general direction of the welcoming perpetual twilight under the bed.

‘Why me what?’

‘Why did you come out to get me?’

‘I was sent.’

‘Sent?’

‘I was told to come out and get you.’

‘You were told to come and get me?’

‘Yes, because right now,’ explained Knickers, ‘we really need a dust bunny who repeats everything we say in the form of a question. “Get that luminous lump out of sight before The Mum sees it.” they said. Before I had a chance to speak, they all puffed at once and here I am in an unasked-for, high voltage static electric clinch with a dust bunny of questionable fibre. This is all because I’m just underwear to them. They don’t care about me.’ 

‘Who’s they?’ asked Rayon.

‘They’re the Biddies, of course. That lot.’

Knickers prised away a thread from Rayon’s electrostatic grip and waved it towards the clumps of dust bunnies watching their approach from under the bedgloom. Rayon could see ranks of dust bunnies, lining every nook and cranny in the clutter under the bed and all around the trench where the carpet met the wall.

‘Yes, meet the Biddies,’ said Knickers. ‘A bit of this and a bit of that. I should warn you - they’re dreadful materialists.’