The Nothing That Is

by Kyle Winkler

There was a duration of static where I felt like the voice on the other end of the line could be standing right around the corner from me. As if they were up against my pantry or hallway. The breathing on the line wasn’t in my ear the way a call usually is. The breathing was behind my ear somehow. That voice that sounded like two voices layered on top of one another. One voice wearing another voice like a sleeve.

That cold fire from my dream returned to me. How I huddled around it in the middle of a field. How I wanted it in my belly.

I crossed my arms with the spoon still clenched in my fist. I looked like a failed Arthurian crusader. The milksop who thought he could fight.

When I looked toward the door, something along the far wall moved. It was a limb. An arm. I followed it up its length. There stood a shape over twelve-foot-tall standing behind the shelves covered in the same sheet as Mr. Dinosaur wore previously. Behind it was a reflective black surface like vertical oil and all poked throughout were winking suns glowing pink, blue, green, bleeding light and sucking it right back in. Every sun was a bleeding mouth and inside each mouth was a seething ball of knotted bodies and each pore in each body was a mouth that tried to tear and bite the one next to it. All was pain. From under the tented sheet, a long-fingered hand unraveled like a tongue and reached out and came down upon me—

Every pore in my body had a mouth. And in that mouth was a hunger for the next mouth’s teeth. I would tear myself apart. This is how I felt.

I marveled at how we, everyone, pretended to be King Shit in our everyday lives when really we were just galactic varnish on some more monstrous and vast body, simply an electric jelly sneezed into space demanding all protons and electrons come to their knees for our whims. It was a dark feeling, and an even worse admission. I wanted to spurn myself for it. Yet I couldn’t. I owned it.

not only did they want people to stop making life, they wanted life to quit on the earth full stop. Not even the Satanists were for that. Satanists were good time folks.

It was a cruel smile. One made by those who claim moral victory over those they capture. It was an evil kindergarten teacher’s smile.

The so-called miracle of life was located in that sliver of molecular jangling that we were, if we were that at all. In an infinity, we were a slice of stupid. A wriggling flagellating host for mitochondria and DNA.