The Nothing by Jesse Beck

The Nothing

Jesse Beck

The dirt that Mel had piled back over the grave still looked a bit odd — a little too freshly dug— but it would suffice. Warm autumn wind rattled through her muscles, ricocheted off her bones, through her intestines, and escaped back out into the night air, washing her of sin. She was properly hollow on the inside, like a jack-o’-lantern filled with remnants of hardened candle wax. This is at least what people told her, always likening her to a shell of a human in their morbid torments. She decided to embrace her hollowness out of spite.

Mel considered this another good day, but her routine was joined by a pit in her stomach. This is not to say Mel was ever bothered by empty space, but this was not the type of nothingness she had grown accustomed to. She tried to ignore her guts growing heavier as she trekked back home, but it was hard not to feel the extra weight in every footstep. Her thoughts began to amass as she hypothesized a plethora of ways where something went wrong, where something made her insides feel this way— but none of them were right. Today was just another good day. Mel chalked it up to a stomach bug and continued her trudge back.

Time began to muddle together and she was halfway home, at her door, undressing, falling into bed. She managed to suppress the feeling and conk out for six shitty hours of sleep. When she woke, her sheets were soaked with sweat and her clammy body was radiating a feverish heat— this was most definitely not a cold; the pit inside her stomach felt more akin to hunger, eating all her pumpkin flesh and threatening to turn her inside out. Mel dragged her burning limbs into the bathroom and collapsed onto the frosty-cold tiles, her cheek treating the floor like hallowed ground, like an ice pack, like her cemetery plot.

She was expecting her normal hollowness to have returned by now, or for the new type of empty to have at least subsided a bit, but she was granted no such reprieve. The vacancy inside her was burgeoning faster than she could process, the emptiness turning into nothing short of a black hole, an accumulation of everything and nothing all at once. She was trembling on the floor of her bathroom, her body completely emaciated, but she felt so. incredibly. full.

All the symptoms were there— this was guilt. Her years of executions had finally caught up to her, a propane tank of remorse filling up her hot air balloon stomach. She knew now that she must repent, she must pay for what she did in order to make that pit inside of her become whole again, she must—

The nothingness erupted and cascaded out of Mel, tumultuously ripping through her flesh and bubbling down onto the floor in a heap of black sludge.

Oh. Nevermind. The nothing was definitely something.