Dust is People!

Dust is People!

Well, skin cells if you want to be pedantic...

I teach this to my eight year old daughter Steph, when she asks me where dust comes from. It disturbs her deeply, and I laugh.

I don't think I had realised how much this knowledge had affected her. I certainly wish I had explained things better, maybe made it easier to digest, when I think about what that information did to her, and what she did in the end.

She started making little 'dust people,' and standing them up around her room at various points. Just little things, a couple of inches high. I'd find them randomly as I was gathering washing, or tidying around a little. Incredibly intricate. She has such creative skills.

It took me a long time to realise that they were in 'defensive' positions, such as on the window ledge, or flanking either side of the door to her bedroom.

I asked her, "How do you stick them together?"

And she replied that she uses slime, and glue, and other sticky things. The dust 'men' look so lifelike, so 'in proportion,' despite them all being only a couple of inches high, that I find myself marvelling at their details, and when I touch one slightly with a finger, expecting it to crumble, it holds its shape. In fact, it feels remarkably solid. It looks like a little person.

I find myself asking Steph how she made them so solid, and she replies, simply, "They weren't in the beginning. They get stronger."

I laugh, because I think she is joking, or trying to freak me out, but her face is deadly serious, her big brown eyes wide.

One day, I accidentally vacuum one up, and Steph screams at me, running at me and knocking the vacuum cleaner over, spilling dust everywhere, trying to find the little man.

I shriek at her, "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

She is clawing through the mound of dust, and, amazingly, the little dust man is in there, still intact, but now in a laying position, his arms over his head, like one of the victims caught in the volcano eruption at Pompeii all those years ago.

She lays him gently down on the floor, and turns to me in defiance, waggling a finger, the way I do at her when she is getting a telling off.

"Mummy," she says sternly, and I try not to giggle as she says it,

"You MUSTN'T hurt them. They'll get angrier. I don't want them to..."

She stops suddenly, looking at the floor.

I find myself whispering, "What will they do?"

She gazes up at me, all big eyes again.

"They might attack you mummy."

I hate it when she's all dramatic like this. But I feel my heart do a double jump. I find myself apologising in a whisper.

'What has happened to me?' I later think to myself. 'I used to be so fearless!'

*

I find myself being extra careful over the following few weeks. I can't explain it, but my daughter's words have affected me. I don't knock over the dust men, and I'm super careful whilst hoovering and cleaning. There seems to be less dust around, which is weird. It usually only takes a couple of days for the dust to start appearing on window ledges and wainscot tops again. But the rooms all seem strangely immaculate.

Later that week, I'm tidying up piles of clothes in her room, when I feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I turn around so slowly that I feel as if I'm in slow motion...

I see a line of men made of dust standing in attack stance across the back of the room. They are huge, a couple of feet tall. They are all facing me. They have weapons in their hands. They are dust. But they are solid. The weapons look even more solid. They glint in the light.

'Oh well,' I think as I drop the clothing and raise my hands in defiance, in deference. 'God knows what Steph will find, the next time she comes in here...'

I stand, and I wait. I watch them through the gap in my raised arms. They don't appear to be moving. But they are shimmering... that's the only way I can describe it. Like an old-fashioned Disney animation that never quite stands still. They are in motion. They are alive.

And I know it is only a matter of time before they come for me. I kneel down, as if awaiting a court martial.

I never should have vacuumed up their fallen comrade. Everyone knows a soldier never leaves a man behind.

And no crime goes unpunished.