Bucket

A little story I wrote a while ago. It's stand alone, however you might find that it might be connected or related to a different story I will write a lot further down the track, one a lot bigger...

A bucket is placed near a table at a popular shopping centre restaurant area. It’s in a spot where at evening when the janitors clean the area up it is hidden by the shadow of the table and is not enough in the aisle to be accidentally knocked over by the janitors. These specific janitors are lazy and never bother getting around to mopping the whole floor. The bucket stays in that area day after day, never to be put away or thrown out. It’s also in an area in the middle where there is no bin nearby.

            Two guys on a serious business meeting sit at the table next to the bucket. They order food and talk. As they keep talking they both get angrier and angrier as they come to a disagreement. Eventually, one grabs the other violently and they yell and threaten each other. One of them eventually leaves. The other stays and gathers up the food that he had dropped. He mainly focused on his own because he thought that the other guy took his food since it wasn’t all there. What neither of them noticed was that a box of friend rice that fell off their table into the bucket lying silently next to it.

            The guy that left went home and raged for a bit. He was about to calm down and start eating when he realised that he missed his food in the rush. This got him angrier because he had no food at this house and, thinking the other guy took it, it made him hate the other guy even more. He had so much anger already that this lack of food and more reason to hate the other guy was enough to make him go insane. He goes out, gets drunk, does some stupid things and eventually ends up crashing his car, killing himself and three other people. None of this would have happened if the food didn’t silently fall into the bucket, because they would have just noticed it out of the corner of their eye rather than just seeing a bucket. They would have gotten over it and it wouldn’t have escalated any further.

            A homeless man who hasn’t eaten for three days was searching around for food and came across the bucket. He ate the fried rice that was mistakenly left in it and it save his life, because in the time and energy he had left he wouldn’t have ended up getting any food. He ate at that table and the left.

This was when it was a really crowded time of day when there weren’t many free tables. Two students who had brought their lunches came as the homeless guy left and took the free table while they could. If the homeless guy hadn’t sat there, then they wouldn’t have gotten a table. The students were both friends but ones seemed a bit angry while the other one seemed really awkward and embarrassed. He was the kind of guy that everyone feels sorry for whenever he makes a fool of himself, which happens all the time because he can’t do anything right. He was carrying a sign that said “give me money” in a really awkward and pathetic joke kind of way, the one that’s more painful to see than funny. They were partners for a business at school for one of their classes. The awkward guy put up this sign which ended up either repelling customers or just confusing them. He hated himself and what he is like as the most embarrassing and awkward failure you would know and always thinks afterwards wondering what he was even thinking. He felt stupid and embarrassed and, just like every other time this happened, was contemplating suicide.

            The two students talked for a while and the awkward guy just kept on making more of a fool of himself and it just kept getting worse and worse. Finally, he got up and decided to throw the sign out as he hurried to get out of there, all embarrassed and flustered. He couldn’t see a bin anywhere near him so in his rush to leave he just put it in the bucket. If the bucket wasn’t there he would have gotten more frustrated and as he rushed to the closest bin, clumsily, he would have made a big scene and embarrass himself way more than he could take in front of everyone there. The faster he tried to leave the more he would bump into people and fall over and do things embarrassing. In the end he would have been crying and yelling and so embarrassed that he would have ended up committing suicide later that day. Because the bucket was there the awkward kid lived on and got over his awkwardness, changing to become a completely different kind of person.

            After the students left two adults sat down to eat and chat. They were having a late lunch because they were working hard on something and just finished it then. They were both really happy because they had just obtained a larger amount of money. They ordered lots of food and were eating, drinking and laughing in their celebration. The entire atmosphere around the shopping centre would have been completely different if the homeless guy hadn’t eaten and someone found him lying somewhere dead. It would have caused the police and ambulance to come. This would have ruined the mood for their celebration, as well as scare them off because they had quite a large amount of money with them and would look really suspicious. In the rush to leave one of them would have taken all of the money accidentally causing the other to think that he was betrayed. There are many minor factors that would have decided which one of them would have accidentally taken all of it but either way the other would have felt betrayed and it would have caused a major conflict between the two of them, which would also bring in other factors to do with them to get involved and old fires to be relit. And as you could imagine, major conflicts between two parties over large sums of money don’t end very well.

            But since the bucket was there and that scenario was averted they got to enjoy a hearty and merry celebration of their success. While they were celebrating and talking they noticed the bucket with the awkward sign in it. They talked about it for a bit, making a few jokes but then decided to play some games. Using dice, cards and coins they decided to play some games of chance with some of their newfound fortunes but to make it interesting they made rules that resulted in some of the money going into the bucket, and by the time they left there was quite a bit of money left in it. Neither of them minded though because they had way more money than they needed as well as plans for the future that they could do now.

            A while later the homeless guy came back to try and get food from the dinner crowd. Because he found food in the bucket earlier in the day and it saved his life he figured he would go back to that area and look for food there. Surprisingly he found the bucket again, with money in it and a sign saying to leave money there, which got him really excited. He decided to leave the sign and bucket there and regularly check on it to see if people would actually leave any more money in it. After he bought some food he realised that he had a lot of money left over. He decided that since his luck was so good today he should try gambling and went to the nearest casino. Whether he won or lost much, he ended up quite obsessed with gambling and completely forgot about the bucket.

            In one day the bucket caused insanity, resulting in four deaths, saved a homeless man and caused him to start gambling, prevented a suicide, prevented a major conflict over a large sum of money and prevented an overall bad atmosphere of the shopping center. The bucket continued to change many lives and save or kill people every day. It gets moved a few times but is always there and never thrown out or put away. Placing this bucket there isn’t something anyone would think to do or could plan for its affects. You would be surprised how significant things can change from the most seemingly insignificant factors. These things anyone can technically do, but no one will because of the factor of knowledge.

            And the thing is, the person who put the bucket there completely intended for all of this to happen.