Dust Bunnies' Quiet Lives

By Peter Bowden

 


They gathered where the light forgot itself, beneath the low horizon of the bed where the floor turned dim and patient. There, in the quiet country of lost things, the dust bunnies made their small, persistent lives. They were not much to look at, soft clots of lint and thread, a gray suggestion of something that might once have belonged to shirts or socks or yesterday’s air, but they moved, in their way, when no one watched. They drifted with purpose, collecting what the world above let fall: a strand of hair, a whisper of paper, the thin husk of time itself. The largest among them kept to the shadow near the wall, where the dark was steady, and the drafts told stories of footsteps passing overhead.

At night, when the house settled, and the boards spoke in small creaks, they came awake in earnest. They nudged one another along the cool grain of the wood, rolling gently as if guided by a memory of wind. They listened to the breathing above them, the slow rise and fall of a sleeper who did not know he was being kept company. Once, a coin slipped from the edge and landed among them with a clean, certain sound. They gathered around it, curious, reverent, as though it were a moon fallen into their sky. It shone for a while in the thin light that found its way under the bed, and then it dulled, like everything did, and became part of their quiet world.

They had no names for themselves, and no need of them. What they knew was the rhythm: the passing of days in dimness, the occasional sweep of a broom that came like weather, terrible, cleansing, and final. Some were taken in that wind, lifted, and gone without ceremony. Others held fast in corners, enduring. And always, after, there were more, drawn from the soft unraveling of living above. If you lie awake long enough and let your eyes adjust to the low light, you might think you saw them shift, just slightly, as if the room itself were breathing. But by morning, they would be still again, waiting, as they always had, for what the world would forget next.

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