I'm writing about nothing—and believe me it can be downright frightening if you utilize the proper point of view.

For instance, In the beginning there was nothing…

That's fine by me, except that nothing tends to spread outward, exponentially, like a crazy equation that trips across the black board of a brilliant mathematician. It broadens as it travels across time and space eventually touching everyone in the universe. If you try to erase it, nothing leaves a smudged Milky Way of drab stars hanging loosely in space, each one a hazy question without a proper conclusion. If you ignore it, nothing will float around out there, bump into other people's private galaxies, and screw up the orbits of all the individual planets.

But that's nothing on a grand scale.

I'm talking about nothing as it exists in our world; the nothing that puddles at the bottom of the basement stairs and waits for an unwary seven-year-old to step in it—the nothing that huddles in the corners of the closet at night and breathes soft monster noises at you while you lie shivering under the blankets—the nothing that your mother tells you is there, in the unlit pantry, every time she asks you to fetch a can of peas for her.

I've met nothing at many times in many places and I can vouch for the fact that it is as mysterious and unpalatable as my mother's pea soup. Like a wad of gum chewed free of all flavor, nothing is a bit of gristle that catches, first in one cheek, then the other, refusing to be swallowed.

It's a mean little bastard.

When I was nine years old, I was playing kick-the-can with a pack of kids from our neighborhood when nothing hurtled straight into the face of one of the players and permanently blinded him. One of the kids said it fell out of the sky like a dead comet. I didn't see a thing but I did hear the other kids screaming. Later on, in the hospital, little Bobby told his parents he saw nothing too.

Mr. Rendle, our postman, delivered a pink envelope to the old lady who lived next door to us; the nothing in it made her cry for days. Nobody was safe from it. Nothing tagged along behind my big sister, slipping out whenever my mother asked her what she was doing. It lurked outside my bedroom window, usually after a bad dream, and left a puff of moisture on the glass that looked like a smeared kiss.

As a child, I hunted nothing like the dog it was. I found it curled up at the bottom of my pockets, paddling around inside the last box of my favorite cereal, or dozing in the dust under my bed. Nothing lingered everywhere—even under the bathroom sink where my Dad stocked the toilet tissue. It wasn't hard to find. In fact, I found so much of it I stopped looking for it. That's about the time it decided to look for me.

I remember putting my precious dime, the one my dad gave me for squishing his empty beer cans, into the coin slot of the bubble gum machine only to find that nothing popped out of the chute. I remember Jamey Samson, the boy who hid nothing in a tight fist behind his back and promised to beat me into a pulp if I told anyone he'd been playing with matches. I even remember how nothing clung to my late-afternoon shadow, chasing me through the apple orchard, while I ran myself into vicious side pains and a bout of goose bumps—each big enough to pass for a mosquito bite.

That was the summer nothing got our telephone number and dialed our house almost five times a week. The telephone would siren until my mother finally put down the iron and picked up the receiver. I guess it didn't have much to say because my mother only listened for a few seconds before hanging up. No matter how many times we asked, she never told us what she heard.

By the time I turned fourteen, I was used to nothing and its quirky habits. I kept it company, out in a farmer's field about a mile from our house. I ate bologna sandwiches and sipped lemony ice tea; while it basked sleepily in the sunshine. I fed it bits of myself, like the chapters of my favorite books or the collection of day dreams I forged out of wistful aspirations. Later on, it demanded a richer diet of baseball games, music lessons, household chores or television. Finally, when I turned eighteen, nothing catapulted me into an adventure that lead me through the turbulent years of college, dating, marriage and childbirth.

Which brings me to the present where nothing whirls in the upper corner of my bedroom, thoroughly at home and still hungry. Late at night, it orbits my head like a dead moon. Perhaps, because it has grown so terribly content with things the way they are, it hasn't moved on to another galaxy. Perhaps, because it has developed a taste for my small, inconsequential planets, it continues to dog me, like a spoiled pet seeking a treat.

I only know that it wants to be fed.

This story is about nothing—because that voracious dog is so relentless—because I've often dreaded the moment when, having scraped my soul clean of all feeling, I might have nothing left to say—and because when I tried to write this assignment, nothing came, first, to mind.

Copyright ©1999 Laurel Wilczek.  All Rights Reserved