"Falling Star"

[keaalu]

Halfway asleep last night, and what happens? My music starts to put pictures in my head, and then I can't get rid of them. Oh well. Funfun. More later if I can think of something interesting to do with it. :)

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Falling Star

     Her day started just like any other normal day. Beryl had just shaken her cornflakes into a bowl and was pouring boiling water onto her teabag when from her balcony there was an almighty thud. She all but jumped out of her skin and poured scalding water all across the kitchen sideboard, then had to leap back from the small tidal wave that threatened to soak her freshly ironed skirt and burn her legs.
     “Fucksake!” she exclaimed, annoyedly, hastily mopping the water with the closest teatowel to hand before it added ‘floor’ to its repertoire of soaking. “If it’s those kids again-”
     It would be the third time this month that she’d been late for work because of the kids in the bottom flat throwing things at her fourth-floor balcony if it was them. They took an obscene delight in doing it now she’d yelled at them – shouldn’t have yelled at them, shouldn’t have yelled.
     Out on her balcony was the football she had predicted. Silver and striped rather than the typical hexagons, but still a football. One day the little bastards would break a wind- oh shit. Shit.
     It wasn’t a football. No football on this Earth could have made such an almighty dent in the concrete. Spherical and silver, sure – football, nuh-uh.
      Christ, maybe it’s a bomb?
     Tentatively, she sneaked out onto the balcony, clutching her mobile phone and preparing to call the Police. Where had it come from? She glanced skywards, but it was your average clear, blue morning.
     It had made a remarkable hole in her balcony, she mused, annoyedly, staring at it. She poked it, to see if it was hot, and found it wasn’t – although it was live, it would seem, as a tiny electric shock ran up her arm and made her yelp.
     Well, there was no way she could go to work now. She called her boss and pleaded a case of food poisoning, and he grudgingly agreed she should stay home, then she fetched her oven gloves and rolled the metal object inside – it was too heavy to lift.
     She studied it for a few minutes, silently, speculatively. It was about a foot and a half in diameter, and a dull silver – not highly polished, satiny. Most of the stripes were in fact grooves, running right around the sphere at a variety of levels, and occasionally bisected by bolts and small dark plates. There was a broad red stripe running a third of the way around the “top” – at least, she guessed it was the top – and that stripe itself bore six smaller yellow stripes, three each end, and what could have been construed to be numbers – 101, perhaps? Although they could just have been part of the design, as towards the “bottom” was another cryptic shape – three lines that formed a sort of “mouth” design.
     She sighed, tiredly. “Well, I can’t sit here staring at you all day,” she informed the sphere. “Maybe the army has lost a flight computer, or something, you look fairly military…”
     She was just dialling the number the Yellow Pages had given her, when from her living room there was a series of electronic whistles. She froze, clutching her phone, waiting for the boom, ignoring the receptionist that was asking tinnily if she needed help at the other end of the line.
     The electronic noises stopped, and she breathed half a sigh of relief – but then the voice spoke. “…ooo my head… where am I?” In spite of her fright, it wasn’t a threatening voice – male, but light, with a slightly American twang, - and quite irresistibly camp. Couldn’t possibly be coming from the sphere, could it?
     She hung up and dropped the phone back onto its cradle without even speaking, and went to investigate the voice.
     The sphere had opened itself up; a long slot across the front, between the badge and the “mouth”, had slid apart to reveal eyes – alert, curious eyes, currently roving her room.
     “Hi,” Beryl greeted, warily, and the eyes slid her way.
     “Hi to you too,” the robot – she guessed that must be what it was – replied, cautiously, and the “mouth” lit up when it spoke, as if to approximate the movement of a human mouth. “…um, silly question, but where am I?”
     “You’re in my flat,” Beryl settled back on the floor, cross-legged, in front of it. “You landed on my balcony this morning. More importantly, where did you come from? I’d like to be able to get you back there.”
     For a second, it – no, not an it, this was clearly “he” – sat silent for a moment or two, and she wondered if his batteries were causing problems, but then his eyes crossed in confusion. “I don’t know,” he replied, plaintively. “I can’t remember. You say I fell onto your balcony?”
     She nodded.
     “It must have jogged a memory circuit out of place.” The ‘sad’ mouth lit up and remained lit. “Great. I can’t even remember who I am.”

Edit: *corrects bad spelling*