Whenever This Happens It'll Be Effortless

Karina bleeds in scribbles, her quick strokes clawing out the song-like scritch of pen on paper. It’s a desperate tune, for she writes to forget that her room has only three walls.

The missing wall, the one that vanished, now leaks incessant nothingness. Facing away from it, Karina’s head throbs at the sound of black echoes.

She should not know about this. She knows that she should not know about this.

With a whisper of a prayer, she writes on, hoping that her room can become complete again, and that she can meet her deadline.

She freezes. Deadline? She never had a deadline. She was just writing for fun.

    But the deadline inches closer.

Karina tells herself to relax. As long as she stays focused, she can do it.

The deadline doesn’t like this mentality, so it shoots further and faster this time. It works.

    Conviction splits open, and her frantic scrawls of ink fill the wound.

Then, the deadline lashes a day closer.

She scrambles out garbage, incoherent, barely legible markings just to fill the page. She’ll fix it later.

But there is not even time for that.

The deadline slashes through, like a blade, covered in the gore of Karina’s slain peace.

Lungs cracks with pain as they squeeze and bulge in rapid contention. Her hand wants to break off, but desperation will spend that hand willingly to beat the inescapable, ever-crushing inevitability of time.

That is, until the pen flies from her hand and into the nothingness behind her. A beat later her notebook flies back there too.

Karina’s spine freezes into a board. Icy sweats chill down her back, eviscerating the warmth of her sweet brown skin.

In the face of her knowledge, or at least her human perception of her knowledge, the capacity to act abandons her. She dares not turn to face the sound behind her.

Instead, she reverts to a more infantile practice.

“Mom!” She yelps to downstairs.

A silence of anticipation, of hope, then a silence of tears.

Mom is not downstairs. Downstairs is not downstairs, the world does not exist outside this house, and this house does not exist outside this room with three walls.

She knows this.

Worse, she is not supposed to know this.

Her heart becomes a drum, pounding percussion through her chest until those bursts leave behind a chasm, a chasm filled insufficiently by the tears that flow onto a bloody lip torn raw by nervous teeth.

Wanting to find her pen and paper, torn unto bedlam from the mucus behind her, lulled by the sweet sin of inaction, Karina sheds one final prayer that things will be alright.

But she can’t sit like this forever.

So, at last, she turns.

She sees nothing. Not nothing, but nothing. No darkness, no white, and nothing in between.

There is something, but it’s nothing. But at the same time, it’s not exactly nothing either. It’s not-nothing.

Her fragile human mind cannot take this, and her consciousness spasms.

Not as if she was sleeping, but more like she’s looking inside her own perception of her world, over and over.

It’s as if she climbed an infinitely tall building to peer down at the impossibly narrow, impossibly deep and ever-falling loop of stairs, stomach filled with sludge because she imagines falling.

It’s like that, but the floor of that building, the one she peers down at, exists in a mirror. No, a tunnel of infinite mirrors that reflect upon themselves endlessly, each mirror reflecting to a smaller self, then that one to a smaller self, and that one to a smaller self still. It never stops getting smaller.

An endless, bottomless staircase that keeps the infinite tunnel of mirrors at its bottom that doesn’t exist to reflect itself into itself, an infinity inside an infinity, creating smaller and smaller tunnels and bottomless staircases over and over again, on and on, ad infinitum.

But even that is not an accurate description, for each of these infinite layers in a higher “existence” that her mind cannot perceive. That’s why it’s nothing, but not-nothing.

She peers into all of it. Her throat is raw from screaming before she even screams.

If this all is an infinite reflection of an infinite tunnel, microcosms within microcosms, where does she lie?

They way her world is, the fact that the endlessness fancies infinite directions and depths, the fragility of her existence, tells her that she lies in whatever her perception of this is.

    Her mind wants to break, but her existence does not allow it.

Karina should not know this, nor should she “be” here. But she can’t stop herself from trying to understand it, to explain it.

Her mind tears itself to hew off it’s skin, trying in vain to find some way to rationalize the not-nothing.

Whatever she stares at, changes her, right now and in the past. Her mind, body, and components flesh off each other, and even her own world becomes lost to her. The feeling is akin to being awake during surgery, only the surgeon is far greater than a mortal, far beyond the universe.

A swoop, then ink permeates the limitless expanse, expanding it, and becoming it. Then it seeks to make her become herself.

“Arrogant? Greedy? Selfish? A slut? Which will you be?”

The voice comes from nothing but her mind, unable to process the changes within herself any other way.

Her arms rush to wrap themselves around her body.

“Stop it,” She protests. “I’m not any of those!”

A slurp, and hot, brown mud gushes out off her, flowing in from the nonexistent in-outside.

This fluid may have given birth to her, but now the black, brown, bitter energy threatens to erase her.

Maybe it’s not the mind, but the body that comes first.

“You are to be thrown into the raving den. Cancer? Blindness? Deafness? Poverty? Depression? Which plague will you bear? Which wolf will gnaw you to a skeletal hull?”

The words without sound－echoes of an infinite, throbbing thunder－shower black rain from the most vital organ.

Her brain a shredded mass of cow slaughter, Karina scrapes at it to find any words that might be heard.

“I don’t want any of this,” She sobs. Please, just give me back my pen and notebook. I promise, I won’t come back here.”

The pop of bone, a few clicking bursts, and a sigh. None of those sounds belong to her, nor can she hear it. If sound exists on a spectrum of silent to loud, this sound exists on another, unfathomable spectrum.

She gets nothing back.

The Ink returns to snake itself inside her, worming away and milking out her biology, right down to the melanin. Removed from a sweet caramel tone, her skin changes to a color of bone, then one of sickness, then a color of nothing at all.

Her hair goes from black and straight to nothing.

The world, her body, her perception of it all deteriorates. The endless not-nothing swells a darkness of many colors, and each color is not discovered by mankind. Worse, each of those colors exists as a blend of other colors that have also been undiscovered by mankind.

Nothing makes even close to sense.

She gets on her knees upside down, and looks up in no direction.

“What do I have to do? Pray? Beg? Cut myself? Please, I’ll do anything! Just give me back my life!”

All is silent. Karina doesn’t realize that her life was never owned by her in the first place.

Her eyes bleed tears. “Just tell me what to do, and I will do it!”

No response, save for the skeletal hum of nonexistence and unreality.

She shrinks, both from the from the expanding, ever-self-deepening not-nothingness, and from her own despair at such a thing.

How unfortunate she is to not die, for those who shrink so much without dying are doomed to eat themselves.

Standing on an implied surface, Karina looks into a direction that doesn’t exist.

This time she seeks no help, nor does she seek answers. Help will not come to her, and this world holds no answers.

Karina looks again, her vision blurred from tears. It’s not as if she could see the endlessness anyway.

Whatever remains of her psyche trembles at its own thoughts.

She knows that whatever has done this is much higher than herself. She put faith in it, prayed to it, begged it, and eventually despised it. But it’s obvious to her now why she was unanswered.

     She’s a mere ant. No, she is not even that. A hundred, no, a million of her could be clasped into one another, and they would still not equal an ant. Everything she knows, her world, her entire universe, is less than a grain of sand on a beach, and even that entire beach does not equal an ant.

How can one even hope to understand a being so much higher than itself? God, gods, a higher power, some blind bastard with a pen? None of them matter. Any perceived notion of the higher being, what it stands for, and even its existence has no weight, nor does it matter.

The words feel true, but they bring her no solace. They don’t comfort her, they bring her greasy sweats that pour from her not-body, not-teeth that bite not-nails until they gush red, and a pressure that flattens her not-stomach until vomit threatens to erupt.

Karina is lost. No notebook, no pen, no deadline.

She is lost. She has nothing, and she never will.

There is no life, or control to be had. It’s all her perspective, her weak, inefficient, narrow perspective. And even that will amount to nothing when she dies.

She knows this, even though she is not supposed to.

Faced with the knowledge of her insignificance, the true pointlessness of her being, and the loss of any perceived meaning thereof, her mind has nothing to do but collapse on itself.

Karina does not know what to do, or where to go. She wants something, anything to take her mind from these thoughts.

But the universe is done with her, because the author has stopped writing her.

The author’s universe is done with him, because the narrator has stopped narrating.

The narrator’s universe is done with him, because I have ended this story.

I wonder, when will our universe decide it’s done with us?