NoThing
a story by Tommie Lee
Published by T.L. Closson, Jr. writing as Tommie Lee
Copyright 2011 Tommie Lee Closson, Jr.
ISBN 978-1-4580-5079-3
If you enjoy this free story, please consider reading more work by this author:
Also by Tommie Lee
Mulligan
For Four Players
Learn more at https://tkcbooks.com
*****
NoThing
She woke up, naked but not chilled, and convinced she had stopped short of a hangover and sauntered back instead towards drunk.
The room held nothing. The room was not a room. It was an empty space, blank whiteness, a clean slate of uncompromised absence. It was as if some giant artist had painted her, three-dimensional, onto a blank sheet of paper without any background.
She had fallen asleep in her favorite bedclothes: the faded blue Troy Aikman jersey her father had given her as a teenager and her old gym shorts from college volleyball. They were also gone. Her bed, her bureau, her hope chest…the room itself: everything was gone. There was nothing but…nothing.
Convinced that she was still dreaming, she decided to stay with this and see where it took her. Not that she appeared to have much of a choice in the matter. She weighed her options with every step she took, her feet touching a clean white floor identical to the walls around her. She began her usual mental pro-con list. It was what she did when trying to find her place in any situation, an old trick she’d learned from her Grandmother.
There were no phone calls from the bill collectors here, because there was no phone and no stack of overdue bills. She wouldn’t have to meet Chris’s parents for dinner tonight. A world of nothing might not be so bad.
It was also very peaceful and quiet, which was something of a pro and a con, as she typically needed background noise to help her focus on things. In this strange, sterile new world, however, there were no backgrounds of any kind. What there was a whole lot of naked self to focus on. So she stopped walking for a moment, looked down, and became very critical of herself. It was what she did in the mirror every day, but at least here she didn’t have much of a view of herself. There was no mirror, nothing to protect herself with. Assuming anyone else happened to be here with her.
The more she thought about it, the more she wasn’t all that impressed with this bill-free world after all.
She began to walk. She wasn’t sure which direction she was moving in, because there didn’t seem to be any directions. There wasn’t a down, because she was walking on a floor. And there only appeared to be so much up before the ceiling dissolved into a sort of haze, like a thick fog or a cloud. Right now, looking up, was the first time she’d noticed that. She didn’t have her contacts in, and it was hard to see far away.
So she walked, naked as the day she was born, across the floor that felt so smooth and comfortable against the rough soles of her feet. She knew she had put lotion on them before she went to bed, after attacking them with the lufa. Now the lotion, the lufa, and the familiar greasy feeling on her feet were all gone.
She didn’t seem to think much over the next few minutes, if that was what they were, before she started to notice the fog approaching from her left. The walls were no longer visible anywhere, just an expanse of nothing. Her mind hadn’t even registered when the walls had ended, and when she looked back…she couldn’t see them anywhere.
She stopped.
The fog was oddly comforting: it was the first real, tangible thing she had seen here other than the floor. It was a Thing in a place without Things, and therefore, it was something other than her own nakedness to focus on.
It continued to approach her. If she moved towards it, it seemed to rush at her twice as fast. It would slow again if she stopped.
Goose pimples ran up and down her arms. The first cold chill in this windless place crossed over her soul and filled her with a feeling of dread and despair as she watched it move towards her.
She thought about it for a moment and decided to try and back away from it; to see if that would keep it at bay. She matched the pace of the advancing fog, and sure enough, it appeared to stay the same distance away from her.
She smiled, and turned around to walk away fom this oh-so accommodating fog. She was met by another huge wall of it, which had been only a few feet behind her, approaching from the opposite direction.
It passed right through her, and she gasped as if expecting some form of monster to be hiding within it. But it was just a smoky fog, moving around her. It didn’t even have an odor or moisture.
She stopped and turned around. The fog that hit her was moving away. The other, more distant wall of fog swept towards it and the spot where she was standing.
Where to go? The fog was moving around now. She started to run away from both the coming fog and the fog that had just passed her. After a few seconds she stopped running…because she wasn’t particularly happy with the way certain parts of her body were flapping around. It didn’t matter that no one else was seeing it…she was. And she was feeling it. And it made her realize she wasn’t going to outrun the fog.
But the fog had already overtaken her once, and nothing came of it. So…why fight it? There was just too much to think about, and no background noise of any kind to help her focus on it all.
So she sank to her knees, sitting on her heels with her toes bent onto the floor, and for the first time began to truly feel cold and alone.
She sat flat on the strange floor after what could have been a few minutes to rest. The floor, though still comfortably warm, felt uncomfortable to sit on without clothing around her nether-regions and her crack. The human body, especially that general area, presses itself flat in odd ways without some form of covering to guard it against a hard surface. She was just thankful it wasn’t cold.
The fog she had originally tried to avoid finally passed over her, and she began to cry: softly at first, and then in gasping, whispering sobs. She felt her bottom lip quiver like the gearshift in the old truck she’d learned to drive a stick in. She couldn’t help but laugh with a sniffle at the thought that the old truck didn’t exist anymore, either.
Boredom swept over her like the two waves of fog had done, and she found herself wishing for her Smartphone. At least she could open up her eBook app and finish that novel she’d downloaded last week. Or try to call someone. Or hope the alarm would wake her up from this odd, sterile purgatory.
“Hello?”
The voice made her snap her head around so quickly that she hurt her neck. She jumped up to her feet, instinctively positioning her arms to cover herself.
A lone figure was moving towards her, slowly fading into her blurry vision. As the subject neared, she saw it was a naked man. He was holding his hands in a protective way, for he was as naked as she was.
There was nothing to hide behind. There was nowhere to go. She decided to wait for him there and hope for the best.
He was very dark-skinned, with Asian features and dark black hair. He seemed every bit as embarrassed about being naked as she was. As he approached, he nodded to her by way of salutation, unwilling to move either hand from in front of his crotch.
“Hello. I’m Arvan.”
She nodded back, “Penny.”
They shared a moment of silence, and then she added, “Nice to meet you. Where in the hell are we, Arvan?”
“I don’t know. I was only in bed for a couple of hours. I had a class this morning at ACU. A final. I was up until three or so studying for it because I had trouble sleeping during the storm.”
“That’s right,” Penny said, “it was storming when I went to bed. I think it was about 1:30 or so, right after Ferguson signed off.”
“And I woke up here with nothing around me at all, not eve
n what I fell asleep in.”
“Me neith --“
“Hello?”
This was a new voice, female this time, and they both peered into the nothingness in the direction of the original fog she had spotted.
The silhouette of a woman, slightly rounder than Peggy, padded slowly towards them across the stark whiteness. They said nothing in reply but stayed where they were, covering their nakedness from each other.
Arvan’s face contorted a bit, his lips jerking to one corner of his mouth as they always did when he was doing his deepest thinking.
“I’ve seen two sets of fog and passed through them. Each one has now proven to have had a person behind it.”
“Yeah, me too,” agreed Penny with a confused sigh. She needed noise to think straight. She’d never realized how important noise was to her until the world seemed to have ran out of it.
The woman was within speaking distance now. Penny recognized her from somewhere, possibly the athletic club where she did her yoga. She was trying to picture the woman in spandex, and failing. Either way, she felt a bit better about her own body. At least she was in better shape than this girl. It wasn’t a particularly nice thing to think nor was she proud of it, but the thought was there. And having something, anything to have a thought about was a vast improvement over the time she’d spent up until Arvan and this woman had shown up. Something was preferable to nothing, even if the something was petty and rude.
“I’m Penny. This is Arvan. We don’t know what’s going on. Do you?”
“I’m Stacy, and no. Pleased to meet you. In fact…I’m glad as hell to see you.” She said this, and even sounded convincing…but the crimson blush of her skin suggested she was mortified to be naked in front of two complete strangers.
“Did you walk through the fog twice?” blurted Arvan, by way of saying hello. Women had never been his forte. His forte typically involved test-tubes and chemicals and impressing professors with his ability to keep explosive things from exploding until they were supposed to.
“Yeah. Why?”
Arvan, forgetting for a moment that he was naked, ran his fingers through his black hair and rubbed his temples, before crossing his arms with his right hand up to gesture with. “It sounds like each of us is surrounded by a wide circle of fog. We passed through each other’s circles and have come together. If…”
He noticed his audience wasn’t exactly focused on his face as he spoke. His hands quickly dropped to his crotch. Penny and Stacy remarked quietly in their own minds that uncircumcised penises did, in fact, look very different.
“I’m sorry. If we stick together, we might be better prepared in case we encounter another group who has mischief in mind, yes?”
The ladies, who hadn’t exactly stumbled onto any better options, nodded.
“Which way should we go?” coughed Stacy, still trying to get the image of Arvan’s penis out of her mind. “I can save us the trouble and say there’s nothing back that way for quite a-ways.”
“And Arvan, you came the same way I did, from further back. There’s nothing there, either.”
Arvan didn’t respond. He was staring behind the girls, watching a thin layer of fog come into view, slowly.
They both turned to see it, and even though Penny couldn’t focus on it or truly gauge how far in the distance it was…she got the gist of what they were staring at.
She pointed over Arvan’s shoulder, careful not to reveal so much as a nipple.
“I think that way.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Stacy assented. Arvan nodded.
“I suppose,” he said, “that I should be a gentleman and offer to walk in the lead, so I’m not staring at your backsides, yes?”
Penny laughed, and Stacy smiled and said: “That would be nice, yes. Plus, this way we can stare at yours.”
“Funny,” he smiled, “that in a world full of nothing, there should still be a double-standard between the sexes.”
They all shared a nervous laugh, and began to walk.