Hope is a cruel beast.

When it comes to me and disasters, it seems that I'm a magnet for them. "Avoiding" is not in my vocabulary. Of course, I'm not very forgiving either.

Don't get me wrong, I can be a nice guy. It just happens to be fact that whatever I touch is usually destroyed within a matter of seconds, even on a good day. Well, okay. I don't have "good days". That's just how it goes.

There are rare occasions where I feel a little bad, though. Yeah, you go ahead and laugh at that. See, there was a town I passed through once. All right, maybe more than once. It was such a perfect little town I just had to destroy something. It's in my nature, you know how it goes. Except I kept going back. Maybe I shouldn't have, I don't know. I never really cared, to be honest, I don't play favorites for anybody. It was just strange.

The last time I went through that city, it was still alive. Barely, it's true, but at least it was still standing. I just went around doing my own thing: misplacing their shop signs, moving all of their cars onto the left side of the street, breaking windows, all that. Heaven knows I've seen enough cities to know which tricks to use, especially on the smaller ones. Even took a few roof tiles with me, I think. What? There's nothing wrong with stealing a roof tile! Or twenty. Forget it.

Usually people will go run off and hide from me when they hear that I'm coming, and rightfully so. I'm not somebody you want to travel with, never mind meet on the street. But this time, as I went through that city, there was a little girl just clinging to one of the posts of the shop on the corner. I'd say that I recognized her, but I didn't. I'd tell you some story about her, about how she lived her life or some little sob story about how she'd been there for each of the times I'd been there before, but to heck if I could even guess how old she was. All I know for certain is she was downright terrified, and something struck me as I looked at her in that little town in the middle of the countryside. I'd never really thought of it before, but it was just so clear and so obvious I felt like I was the one getting hit in the head with a brick.

How well you loved and lived your life before the storm determined, to a large extent, how well you survived after it passed.

I don't know why I thought it then, I really don't. It just dawned on me, like how you don't notice it's raining until a drop hits the center of your forehead, or lands in the part of your hair. It was like that.

Anyway, I'm usually not bothered by the destruction I'm prone to making. I've been known to level entire towns before, and I'm still just hanging out here on my own. No big deal. Well, it is for them. Sometimes I'll make games of it and try to see how much stuff I can displace before moving on to bigger cornfields. Yeah, you can laugh at that, too. I'm just a sucker for the countryside.

I can be a nice guy if I want to, I just usually don't. So I don't. But that time I felt bad, so I left. Something about the girl, I think; it's hard to care when you don't see anybody when you're destroying cities. It was a little uncharacteristic of me, sure, but it's been known to happen. What else is new? I'm not unpredictable for nothing.

Every once in a while I'll go back past that little town, but never through it. Wouldn't matter if I did or didn't, everybody left after my last visit. Proverbial last straw or whatever. Fun little ghost town now.

I still destroy cities, though. I'm not a "changed man" or what have you. I'm not changing. Why should I? But it's still curious. You humans, with your predictions and your trying to stop me from destroying what I do. Please. You'd do better trying to catch water with a colander.

But never mind that. I have to apologize, I chose my words poorly. I don't attract disasters. I am one. And if there's one thing I've learned during my practices of demolishing things, it's this: I am a destroyer of the Earth, and I strew hope in my wake.

Written for the Review Game's Writing Challenge Contest for August 2011. Please follow the link in my profile and vote for mine, many thanks!