The Rubbish Realm

Chapter 1

Chapter 1
Clyde awoke to a crash. His first thought was “An earthquake? In Wisconsin?” His second thought was “What happened to the roof?” And his third, the most important question of them all, was “What is with the sky?”
As you can probably tell, Clyde was very confused and more than a little bit dismayed. It’s hard enough waking up in the middle of the night to normal circumstances, but these were clearly not normal circumstances, or anywhere close to it. Clyde got out of bed… wait, he wasn’t in bed anymore. Looking around, he saw that he was on what used to be his floor, and his bed was destroyed under rubble! How am I still alive? he thought. And what happened to destroy my house? He could not help thinking about the mortgage and how he could ever pay it off, what with his lack of home insurance.
But, a cursory glance around him and a stab of pain from his knee brought him back to reality, or at least what seemed to be reality. After all, this whole experience so far had felt quite unreal to Clyde.
All around him was rubble as far as the eye could see. Somehow, impossibly, he was nearly unharmed even though the entire roof and all four walls of his house had all collapsed, no stone left on top of another, so to speak. He had rolled off his bed into the only spot in view that was not covered in the all-encompassing rubble. But, with the bleak landscape, it appeared that he was doomed anyway, incredibly lucky just to die a more painful death of starvation.
Remembering that, he figured he might as well check the refrigerator, to see if anything had survived, but of course the refrigerator was crushed, as was his entire pantry. He went to go ask his neighbor for something to eat, but then he saw their house, similarly destroyed, and he turned away in sorrow, knowing there was no way they could have survived like he did. In the end, he realized he was lucky he lived alone. Anybody else in his house was doomed. He should have been doomed. He still was doomed.
Knowing the futility of it, he yelled, “Anybody home?”, trying to find any other survivors, but of course there was no reply, save an echo in the distance.
There are few things more depressing than waking up in the morning to find that your house is destroyed, all your neighbors are dead, all your possessions are gone, the whole neighborhood is rubble, and you’re likely going to starve. And then add onto that the fact that he had no water, was wearing his pajamas and slippers, and that the heat was, unsurprisingly, destroyed, leaving him to suffer fifty degree weather, or at least that’s what it felt like. And so, Clyde did what any reasonable person would have done given the circumstances - he broke down and wept.
After a little while, he composed himself again and decided to analyze what he could do. The words of Frozen 2 rang in his head, of where Anna is left alone, Elsa having perished and Olaf having fallen with her, to save the forest all by herself - “Just do the next right thing”. Although here, Clyde didn’t have such a straightforward goal, and the fact that he only had slippers to protect himself from the rubble certainly wasn’t helping his planning. He decided to check the time before realizing that he had left his phone plugged in and it had been destroyed, just like most everything else. So, he decided to estimate what time it was from the sky… but the sky was all wrong. Instead of the sun in any corner of the sky, or even clouds, the sky was simply a dull blue, save for a portion where it seemed to have a hole, right above him, where he could see a familiar-looking dusky sky once again. What in the world? Where am I? And why - what- -
Even so, that hint of dusky sky seemed to be brighter than his future.
But, realizing the current uselessness of this train of thought, he turned his mind to more pressing matters. How was he going to escape the rubble? How was he going to find food and water? How was he going to survive to live another day?
Another wave of depression hit him quickly and he came to the conclusion that this was undoubtedly the worst day of his life so far, even worse than when his mother had died, and thinking about that caused him to melt into a total breakdown and he collapsed in hopelessness.
But his hopelessness was interrupted by a crinkling from his pocket, reminding him of the granola bar he had pocketed the night before. Well, better than nothing, he supposed as he consumed it slowly, savoring every bite as he knew it very well might be the last thing he would eat. It left his mouth dry, reminding him of his Nalgene water bottle, which was supposed to be able to handle being dropped from a four story building. Perhaps that had survived, he thought, and started digging through the rubble where it would have been.
Finally, after nicking his fingers multiple times on the jagged edges of the rocks, he found it: dull orange, scratched up, and dusty against the gray rocks. It was half full, or half empty, depending on how you think of it. Clyde, for one, was in a very pessimistic mood at the moment, and he knew it was half empty. So he took only a small sip, trying to conserve it for later despite what his dry throat was telling him.
And then, having taken care of that, he once again was left to face the rubble and the seemingly insurmountable barrier it presented. After only three steps, his feet, only protected by the thin slippers, informed him rather impolitely that this was not a viable solution, or at least certainly not for long enough to endure the amount of time it would take to cross the far-as-the-eye-could-see sea of rubble.
Lost, confused, depressed, and still not even fully awake, he figured his wisest course of action would be to fall asleep and deal with his problems later, and so, remarkably, despite the lack of a pillow and sleeping on the floor, staring straight up at the dawning hole in the strange sky, he fell asleep immediately.