Introduction:
As an English major in college (e.g. useless), I used to write a lot of creative fiction. Then, I got into filmmaking and my creative writing turned more to screenplay form.
Well, as the global pandemic has made the act of physically shooting something with a crew of people a literal impossibility, I decided to try my hand at writing narrative fiction again.
So, here it is…my first short story in…gosh…probably over a decade, written very quickly in 5 minute increments in between watching my kids and struggling to find time to work.
Enjoy.
The Story:
I first saw the Void on the evening of July 31st.
It was one of those summer days that felt never-ending, hot and thick and soupy.
I was going for a “run” — less to stay in shape and more so to just avoid reading that dumb Paw Patrol book for the trillionth time.
The Void was small back then — you had to squint to notice it — like a dead pixel on some sort of massive video screen: the sky a mixture of blue and pink, interrupted by a tiny dark rectangle.
Odd. Uncanny.
Of course, it was on the news that night. All over everyone’s social feeds.
First, people tried to chalk it up as some weird weather anomaly — a refraction of light caused by smog or summer heat or something scientific and meteorological, and thus, foreign.
This was quickly replaced by conspiracy theories about chem trails and mind control, and then, what was my initial assumption, some dumb viral marketing stunt for a shitty movie or TV show that would come out a year from now.
But, no…this was…different…
That night, Audrey and I huddled over our phones, our elbows digging into the white granite of the kitchen counter. Lily was asleep upstairs.
Not without a fight, Audrey had been sure to remind me.
“I’ll do bedtime tomorrow,” I offered.
“Hmm…” she muttered, her thumb scrolling, her face illuminated by blue screen light.
Not looking up: “Did you see this? The weird rectangle in the sky?” she said quietly.
“Yeah on my run…up on crescent…where the road hits that hill.”
“Your run? Or, your walk?”
She was joking, but I could sense the hint of malice behind her quip. I had a dad bod now and we both knew it.
“What do you think it is?
I shrugged. “Something disappointing.”
The video of the drone went viral instantly.
The following morning, just before dawn, a hobbyist had flown one of those high-altitude personal drones straight into the dark rectangle.
And, then…it just disappeared.
It was there. Then, not there.
A flick of a switch. In one frame, gone the next.
The internet exploded. Was the video doctored? Was it aliens? A portal to another dimension? Time travel?
We were all suddenly living the first act of a science fiction movie — the 20 minutes or so before all the aliens decided to come in their flying saucers and blow us to smithereens.
It was changeless. A solid, dark shape that didn’t seem to react or recognize the sun and changing weather. A missing piece in the rendering of the sky.
I don’t remember how the term “the Void” entered the public lexicon. I think it was a hashtag first — people organizing their attempts at ephemeral online virility. The disappearing drone proved to be a modest start: soon people were launching whatever they could into it — model rockets, kites, remote control airplanes.
Bullets followed, of course, the constant crack of gunfire made our Maryland suburb sound like it was suddenly ground zero of a war-zone.
Soon, just to make sure someone didn’t inadvertently get shot, police set up sentries to guard the flat plateau on the edge of town — the area that seemed to be geographically below it.
The FBI came next.
Then, the military, along with reporters from every news outlet known to man. And, then, more and more tourists and gawkers hoping to gain access to the perplexing anomaly.
Scientists started operating controlled experiments, attempting to gather video footage of what lay in the darkness.
But, as soon whatever fancy high-tech device entered the Void, it immediately disappeared. Video feeds turned to static.
They sent in mice…monkeys…rabbits. All blipped into the abyss.
It was Audrey who first made a comment about how it was getting bigger. We were in our backyard, watching as Lily played in her sandbox.
“It’s larger, don’t you think?” she said, sipping lazily on lukewarm red wine as the sun set.
“What?” I said, not looking up from my phone.
“The Void.”
I shrugged. “Maybe you’re just getting used to it.”
Then, Lily vomited. Right into her sandbox — granular cakes of dirt and puke forming upon impact. Immediately, she vomited again.
I remember telling Audrey she was overreacting when she demanded we take Lily to the hospital.
“Two-year old’s throw up!” I said.
I remember rolling my eyes as she signed the form in the waiting room and the receptionist made copies of our insurance cards.
On TV, a scientist was confirming that the Void was, in fact, growing larger…not only growing larger, but moving closer to the ground, stretching towards Earth.
Anybody will tell you that medicine is far from a science: a bunch of highly educated, highly paid people in white coats all making conjectures about a complex and finicky network of blood and nerves and tissue.
At first, people assumed Lily had a UTI. She kept vomiting.
Then, it was conjectured that it was some sort of allergy — mold or dust or cat hair. Three-thousand dollars and one advanced HVAC filtering system later, she kept vomiting.
Months later, we visited a pediatric specialist. I didn’t roll my eyes this time when they copied our insurance cards.
“Is her vomiting effortless?” the doctor asked, an Indian woman with a low and warm voice that belonged on audio books.
Audrey and I looked at one another. It’s a question we had never really contemplated.
“Does it just come out? Without retching or distress?” the doctor clarified.
We both nodded.
“I’d like to schedule an MRI of her head.”
“Why?” Audrey asked.
“Just to make sure there’s nothing up there that shouldn’t be…pressing on her emetic center, making her vomit…”
“What? Like a tumor?” I interjected, hoping that the question would be immediately discarded with a scholarly wave of the hand.
Instead, there was only silence.
I never “took” to fatherhood like they said I would — some magical, innate paternalistic instinct of overwhelming love that kicks in as soon as your child enters this world.
Don’t get me wrong: I played the role I was supposed to. I took care of her. Read her books. Prepared her food. Changed her diapers.
But, I could never shake the fact that I was going through the motions — doing it all because I was supposed to, not because I wanted to. And, the guilt would simmer inside my belly as if I had swallowed an unspoken shame.
The surgery on Lily was like a game of Minesweeper, doctors poking and prodding her brain in an effort to clear out her tumor without permanently impairing her in the process.
There was collateral damage. Bell’s palsy. A lazy right eye. The cranial nerve that serves her right ear was severed, so she was deaf on that side now.
I didn’t have to read that dumb Paw Patrol book anymore.
Care used to be an annoyance, now it was my entire life.
Audrey and I would stay up late at night, doom scrolling child medicine message boards, searching for a bastion of good news from a community of fellow cursed parents.
On a follow-up visit, a scan revealed that there was evidence the tumor — an ependymoma they called it — was starting to re-grow, a persistent weed that wouldn’t stay gone, that wanted to grow so my daughter could not.
Lily died 4 months later.
Around that time, exactly one year since it first appeared, the Void had reached the ground.
The first person to enter the Void did so in the cover of night. He was a preacher of some sort — one of those fire and brimstone evangelicals who had convinced his followers that the anomaly was a connective portal to God.
He set off fireworks near the clearing to distract the guarded sentry and, sprinting at full speed in the shadows, managed to make his way inside before he could be stopped.
And, like everything else, he immediately disappeared.
It was somehow different when a human being blipped away. There was a tangibility now that no amount of drones or rockets or tennis balls could match.
He wasn’t an outlier — whether it was driven by sheer human curiosity or a sense of divine purpose — others followed, demanding to be let inside…to be given the opportunity to see what was beyond the veil.
A wormhole to another dimension? A shortcut to heaven? To hell?
And, so, in the absence of any significant scientific breakthroughs, the militarized protection of the Void started to wane.
Troops left. In their place, a sort of regimented bureaucracy — a formal procedure for how to enter the Void, if you so desired, was put into effect. It was all very official. There were waivers that needed to be agreed upon — as if a signed piece of legalese would somehow matter once you went through to the other side.
As expected, the devout were the first to volunteer. After all, this was the messiah, right? The sign they had been waiting for. Priests, sheiks, and rabbis signed their forms and entered in droves. And, subsequently, were never heard from again.
Environmentalists proposed the idea that the Void could be used as a way to dispose of excess plastic in the ocean — an insatiable garbage dump to rid us of all the excess we had engorged ourselves with as we slowly destroyed our planet. But, this quickly proved unfeasible, as the logistical act of simply getting all the garbage to this one spot was an impossible obstacle to surmount.
And, so, in a way, tourism became the Void’s primary function — a one way trip for all who dared to enter. Destination: unknown.
There were the believers and the devout, yes. But, there were also the Instagram influencers searching for hits, their live streams immediately cutting to nothing once they moved inside. This was followed by those seeking painless euthanasia — the terminally ill that no longer could live the life they wanted, hoping the other side was somehow better. Then, those with depression or those who were simply just bored or fed up with their lot in life.
Our town became the most tagged location on Instagram, surpassing Disney World, the Statue of Liberty, and the Eiffel Tower.
I barely responded when Audrey told me that she wanted to enter the Void.
We had mostly stopped communicating anyway — we were barely even roommates at this point.
I started sleeping in the spare bed we had in the basement, not because we fought or there was animosity between us, but rather because I felt calm in the quiet, staying up late at night in the darkness, no difference between my eyes being open or closed.
“I think I should go in,” Audrey muttered as we both doom scrolled our feeds one morning.
I let out a low grunt — a sort of middle ground between acknowledgement and surrender.
“You know…just to see if there is anything…else.”
When you experience loss and grief, you don’t bemoan or curse the world…not really. Rather, you are simply exposed to its ambivalence — this horrifying realization in the meaninglessness of it all…how nothing you do is special…how you are a mere data point in an infinitely complex set of code that will continue scrolling upwards with or without you.
Happiness can provide a distraction to this truth, and in its absence, all you can see is the algorithm.
And, so, when Audrey said she wanted to volunteer to enter the Void, all I could feel was a sort of resigned numbness.
She filled out the forms. Signed the papers. Said her goodbyes to the few contacts we still occasionally talked to. Both her parents were dead, and her brother lived in Seattle and only called once or twice a year.
It was, honestly, a pretty simple and efficient process.
She received an approved entry date.
As we stood near the clearing waiting for her turn, she leaned in and gave me a hug, more so as a formality rather than a natural act of emotional compulsion. She had run out of tears in the past year.
She pulled me close and whispered into my ear, her words simple and blunt: I just don’t want to see the algorithm anymore.
Living by myself, I was suddenly afforded the time that parenthood had taken from me. I could do anything at any time. The freedom was terrifying.
I’d still go on runs. I’d putter around with my graphic design business for a few hours every day, staring at my computer and making generic logos with swoops and swishes. I lost weight.
Mostly, I just continued to doom scroll. Watching people livestream their journey into the Void became a fascination of mine: it was addictive watching their nervous, smiling faces immediately click out of existence, their feeds cutting to black. It was the same, but always different.
My runs got longer, my muscles stronger, my body leaner. I found therapy in sweating…in feeling lifeless and spent.
I still slept in the basement.
I started running several miles to the Void every night. Late, when voluntary entry was no longer being allowed for the day, I often found a spot on the hill overlooking it — its blackness so pure that the night sky, riddled with light pollution and refraction, couldn’t compete.
Sometimes I would think about Audrey. About where she was or where she wasn’t.
Was it the same as being dead? The same as where Lily was? When you’re gone, does it really matter?
One night, on a particularly long run, I was surprised to find someone else sitting at “my spot” overlooking the Void.
It was late November and I could see her breath billowing in the crisp night air — she shivered against the cold, wrapped in an oversized hoodie, her knees pulled to her chest.
I approached, my running shoes crunching on the grass. Startled, she turned.
There was an elongated pause as we each waited for the other to say something. When neither of us did, she gave a polite nod and turned once again to face the Void.
I sat down about 20 feet away, enjoying the feel of the cold on my sweat-covered body — I imagined my skin being coated with the wet frost that accumulates on the inside of a freezer door.
We sat there for some time. Neither of us said anything. Then, eventually, she got up and left.
A few nights later, she was there again. Same position, different hoodie.
And, we sat there, staring at the Void. Saying nothing. Alone but also together.
It became a sort of routine. Each night I’d arrive about halfway through my run, and she’d be there. There was the cordial nod, and then, I’d find myself a plot of grass near her but not too close.
Just before she’d leave for the night, we would make eye contact and hold it for a beat too long, almost as if we were daring the other person to say something about the Void…to acknowledge what we were doing.
Was she debating whether or not she wanted to go in? Did she lose somebody too?
Hasn’t everyone?
I began to study her face in these moments, trying to place her age and status: she had one of those faces that made her look younger than she actually was, round and smooth. Her eyes were large and clear blue, but recessed deep inside her sockets.
She looked tired.
I’m sure I did too.
Just before Christmas, I arrived at the overlook. She was there of course, sitting in a fresh dusting of dry snow.
We followed our usual routine. We stared in the darkness, almost like we were trying to take something from the nothing.
And, after about 20 minutes or so, we turned and stared at one another. Held eye contact.
Then —
“I’m not coming back.” She said it softly, but clearly and with purpose.
A pause as I tried to understand. My eyes darted towards the Void.
“You’re going inside the — ”
“No,” she interrupted. I’m not coming back here.
She hung on the final word, sliding over the single syllable like she was playing a stringed instrument.
I didn’t know how to respond. I wanted to ask why, but for some reason it felt inappropriate and too personal, regardless of how many hours we had spent sitting next to one another.
“I’m tired of looking inside it,” she added.
I nodded.
She stood. I stood.
We both stared at one another awkwardly, my weight shifting nervously from foot to foot.
She moved closer to me. “I hope you get tired too.”
And, then, abruptly, almost like a reflex, she pulled me into an embrace. It was tentative at first, but as I responded and wrapped my arms around her, she pulled me tighter, tears slowly sliding down her cheeks.
This embrace wasn’t a formality.
And in it, I was lost. But, not the kind of lost where there’s a desire to search for an exit, but a sort of abandonment of want or worry — all of it sucked away into the ether. Because in that moment, I knew that we could both be found again. Here, in the tangible, I knew we could find a way back.
After a second or minute or hours, she pulled away, wiped the tears from her cheeks, and gave that polite nod.
I never saw her again.
The Void is still there, of course. People still line up by the hundreds every day for a chance to even see it.
The local government has started charging just for the chance to take a picture of it.
As I was scrolling Twitter one night while eating dinner, I saw a news report about the Void. Apparently, it’s growing bigger still. Having reached the ground, it is now becoming wider — growing millimeter by millimeter over the last several months.
There is growing speculation from scientists that all the things that have entered it have increased its dimensions, feeding on a steady diet of lost souls.
And, me? I wait…on the outside.
I still take nightly runs, but never again to the overlook.
I hold myself back with every ounce of willpower I have left. I hold on to the nothingness in front of me.
I don’t go in.
