The passing of Pure

when it was all snug and quiet, Rayon heard a voice arching high and clear over the silence.

‘The Wind that blows backwards is coming!’

‘Not now, Pure. This isn’t the time,’ shouted out a neighbour of Rayon’s and Rayon turned to see who he was yelling at.

‘The Wind that blows backwards is coming!’

Clearly visible, way out beyond the security of the chair legs, was a creamy white, pristine dust bunny, lightly fluffed within, more translucent than transparent. She was a wisp of a thing, threads teased out into shades of white and light and without a particle of dust clinging to her.

‘Pure, commence immediate return to secure position.’ Rayon recognised Twill’s bossy voice calling out, but the message wasn’t getting through to Pure.

‘Vortices! Vortices! Fan death in a tube!’ cried Pure to the ceiling. Pure was rolling out towards the dangerous reaches, far beyond the chair’s forelegs; a region feared and avoided by sensible dust bunnies for its lack of cover, low snagging opportunities and glaringly high visibility in the face of a hostile tidy-up. There she span and tumbled in a loose circle, wailing about mass displacement, the tubes and, woe, the nozzle.

Rayon nudged his neighbour and pointed at Pure. ‘What’s she talking about? And isn’t it dangerous out there?’

‘That’s Pure,’ explained Rayon’s neighbour. ‘She’s one hundred per cent pure unbleached organic fair trade cotton, but her name shrank to Pure. Seeing how she’s closer to a natural state and all, she has visions. She’s a lovely bunny, but oddly woven.’

‘But what’s she talking about?’ asked Rayon.

‘And an unnatural Wind shall turn against us and lay low the realm of the dust bunnies,’ wailed Pure

‘It’s generally hard to tell until afterwards,’ said Rayon’s neighbour. ‘She tends to be light on specifics. Doesn’t sound good, though, does it? Oh, she’s off again.’

‘Bow to centralvac, HooverDysonElectrolux, greater cleaning power, flexibility and no pesky cords.’

At that moment, the bedroom door banged open and The Andrew barged in, wrestling several meters of unwieldy black tubing, as thick as his wrist, into his room. Having been thrown to the floor, the coils of the central vac lay dark and silent.

There wasn’t a bedroom dust bunny that wasn’t paying rapt and mute attention as The Andrew searched amongst the coils for what the dust bunnies knew to be the tail.

‘What in the name of all that is manufactured is that?’ asked a startled and not-a-little-nervous Rayon.

‘That’s the central vac, that’s what that is,’ replied his neighbour. ‘All you can do now is stay low and hang on tight. Don’t do anything brave. You’ll know when it’s over – you’ll either still be here or you’ll be somewhere very, very dark.’

Rayon and the dust bunnies watched as The Andrew triumphantly pulled up an end of the tube and thrust it into a receptacle in the wall. Through the floor and through the air, Rayon sensed something starting. A light wind was stirring now, getting faster.

Twisting in circles to unravel the hose, the unseeing, unthinking rear-end of The Andrew bumped into the chair by the door, nearly toppling it, but the chair leg came crashing back down, trapping Pure by her longer threads. Pure didn’t seem to notice. With her threads starting to flap in the increasing air current, she still managed to point an accusatory thread at the central vac.

‘It comes, it comes! A plague on its laminar flow, a pox on its turbulence. Curse its pressure gradients!’ cried Pure. ‘Vile Corryvrecken of the air.’

From somewhere in the coils of tubing, The Andrew pulled out the roaring blunt, headless body of the central vac. He fitted a long black tapering snout on to the blunt end, which heightened the roaring of the vacuum cleaner to a fiercer shrieking blast. Now the blind, mindless sucking maw of the central vac had the undivided attention of the massed ranks of mute and inert dust bunnies. That unseeing, untiring, ever-inhaling head, seeking, probing, was about to reach into the remote unsullied parts other vacuum cleaners could not reach; deep, deep into the rarely-visited domain of the dust bunny.

Although pinned down by the chair leg, not even trying to pull herself away, Pure remained defiant. In plain sight and with no attempt at concealment, resolute and still declaring at the tempest, Pure railed even as the howl of the central vac reached full song.

‘Maelstrom! Vortex! Inhalation!’

The Andrew had his hand around the throat of the central vac now and lowered it to the floor. The dust bunnies watched in mute horror as the screaming black head of the central vacuum swung to and fro in a slow, methodical sweep, advancing systematically across the floor from the door towards Pure.

‘At least he’s not using the head of the spinning brushes,’ shouted Rayon’s neighbour over the noise. ‘It beats as it sweeps as it cleans. Just cling on and hope he’s too lazy to do the job properly.’

‘What about Pure?’ yelled back Rayon.

‘Nobunny can do anything for her now.’

The Andrew jabbed the snout of the central vac at the base of the chair leg. The central vac’s suction had Pure completely in its grip now. The full force of the central vac clawed at her very fabric, tearing her apart, fraying away the extremities of even her stronger threads. Pure’s looser threads were beating this way and that and some suddenly whipped away in their entirety, reducing her to an even skimpier version of herself.

Rayon could see her threads thrashing in the torrent of air, suddenly being snatched away by the teeth of the gale. She was getting smaller as he watched. Even as she faded away, Rayon could still pick out Pure’s plaintive voice over the world-filling noise, crying out.

‘Yarn, Yarn knows how to save us. Yarn will help us save ourselves. Yarn...’

Rayon had no idea what she was talking about. Pure’s voice was drowned by the howl of the central vac and Rayon could only watch as, thread by thread, she was finally teased apart, plucked and torn into a nothing. All that remained of Pure was a few snapped and torn thread ends snared under the chair leg.