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"Watch It There, Bucko"
Bucko stopped what it was he was doing and turned around. A metal thing you'd be inclined to call a widget, even if that wasn't the proper name for it, fell out of the box he had in front of himself. The front that was actually at his back at the moment, as he'd turned around.
He shook his hand free of the semantics that had gotten tangled there and stood up. He would have looked fitting, not to mention menacing (or to mention menacing, as it was), brandishing a spanner of hefty proportions in his right hand as he turned around and rose, but as it was he was holding, possibly brandishing, if you have an overactive imagination, a very tiny screwdriver (with which he'd been worrying the widget-looking thing before being stopped in his work), which was in no way menacing, and the very thought of the screwdriver being menacing or a person attempting to look menacing with such an implement, either for lack of anything else at hand or by choice was enough to make you giggle aloud.
Which is what the large man in the dirty coveralls did.
The large man in the dirty coveralls who, had you been introduced under different circumstances, you would never ever picture as one who giggles. But there you go, he was. People will surprise you every day.
"What?" said Bucko. He shrugged. The tiny screwdriver went along for the ride. It felt slightly dizzy at the end of it all.
Bucko turned from his question and leapt across the floor for the metal widget-looking thing, which had begun to crawl off for a chair-shaped sheet on the other side of the room, the effort of which (the effort largely and most particularly his foot as it left the ground on his way through the air for the metal widget-looking thing), unfortunately kicked and up-ended the box containing a good deal of other metal things (though none so widget-looking as the one he clamped with his left hand to the floor).
The large man in the dirty coveralls stopped giggling as a few of the metal bits splattered across his coveralls and face, one lodging unseen to himself and Bucko on the fabric under his armpit, and bound to be a nuisance at some point later. He ran his remarkably fat fingers over his face three times, then started giggling again. One of his fingers pointed at the definitely inanimate array of metals things spread across the floor mostly opposite Bucko's legs as he brought his arm down from rubbing his face and further on it's way into his pocket with the rest of the fingers.
Bucko was a thinnish sort of lad, himself, with hands that always seemed to be busy and looked most natural wrapped around a metal widget-looking thing, which are conducive to being the object of busy-ness.
In the grand scheme of things, if he were living with a giraffe people would most likely describe him as 'living in Fulham with a giraffe and a sort of confusion about his place in the Universe the way a lot of central characters do these days, and with good reason. The confusion, not the giraffe.'
As it was, he didn't have a giraffe, and no one described him terribly often, as it's not nearly as interesting telling someone about someone else if the person in question haven't got a giraffe and it's entirely too difficult figuring out where someone without a giraffe fits into the grand scheme of things.
He did, it is interesting to note, have a habit of mispronouncing 'scheme' as 'skem.'
All of which is nice, though it might be slightly more relevant (and recent) to note that, as he lay on the floor with his hand over the formerly slow-moving now non-moving widget-looking thing he didn't have the tiny screwdriver in his hand any longer.
disclaimer:
This is, apparently, a character and bits of a short story Will Murphy's working on at the moment, and he figured he'd throw it out there and let people say what they think about it. Or so he specified in the email this one came in on. You can email him feedback at murphy.w@sanemagazine.com.
He would also like to note that if you are his publishers, you needn't send feedback along the lines of "Where the hell is Sleep(s) on Chickens, already?" or "If we don't see any progress on the novel we're going to send over a squadron of lawyers and their dogs," as he's gotten quite a bit done on it, and will be shipping off the latest drafts within the week and would like to note that he now has it on public record that he is, indeed, working on the novel, and if anything happens to him that causes him to cease to be heard from or impairs his ability to breath and/or function the way he's happy doing (which apparently includes disregarding deadlines, but we won't say anything about that for fear of the pot/kettle/black situation) he has witnesses in the billions and billions of weekly readers of the beloved and mostly on-time Sane Magazine (who are finally and thankfully properly captialising their name when doing the self-referential thing, you might have noticed).
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Yer Weekly Horoscopes. Ferret and firkin.