Downriver

It started as an uncomfortable feeling.

Not really an event, but not quite a dream, the far off rumble snuck up gently. Popey didn’t wake up right away.  Instead, he flinched over on his side and under his grass pillow and then flat on his front as if he was rolling to get away.  But it didn’t work.  The rumble finally got him.

Sitting up, Popey realized that he and everything he owned was now thumping up and down, and violently.  He threw open his mouth to gasp in a breath of cool air.  Instead, found that his heart had been thrown up into his throat, pulsing wildly to the throbbing beat of the closer and closer rumble.

He tossed off his covers and ran to the top of his tiny burrow on wobbly but determined legs, and nudged his head out to see what this could be.  All he saw was a shining wall of metal boiling the ground before it, sometimes pounding angrily at the earth.  It was heading right for him!  With a bursting leap and a crawling run, Popey tumbled off to the side of this terrible Demon.  It passed him by with a cloud of dust and foul smoke, leaving Popey flat on his back, and not sure if the world was upside down or not.

Only his thin white pajamas covered his three and a quarter inch tall body.  He lay there a moment and panted in the settling, greasy air.

Popey had seen shiny metal Demons before, but they were never like this one.  They were always much smaller, and only cut a shallow trench in the earth.  Besides, even they had not been through this field for two whole years now.  It was as if they had come back with a vengeance.

When the dust and smoke cleared, Popey rolled over to look.  This Demon was much larger, with a huge yellow body behind the metal.  It sucked in breath through its mouth with a whoosh and belted out smoke from the top.  And it left everything smooth and flat as it rumbled forward.  When it was done, Popey’s house and everything he owned had simply vanished.