Nothing. There seemed to be nothing, yet somehow somebody entered into that nothing, carrying only a pen and a pad of paper. He looked around, gazing intently at nothing, taking it all in, and then sat down.
After another look, he focused his full attention on the paper and began to write. At first, nothing stayed nothing; then nothing changed, and there was something.
There was a rumble, a shaking of the earth that was not yet there. From behind the writer, a thin pole-like stick erupted from the ground and shot up into the sky that wasn’t there yet either. With a barely audible hiss, the stick began expanding like a balloon from the bottom up, simultaneously sprouting sickly arms that twisted in every direction and more. With a final, silent pop, leaves sprung from the branches and there was a tree.
Directly above, whatever light had illuminated the nothing became brighter and brighter until it reached a blinding intensity that abated gradually, revealing a heavily trodden dirt path, speckled here and there with various bits of debris of no apparent aesthetic value. The path, however, ran only in front of the preoccupied writer, who, through he rested against the tree, still sat on nothing.
But then that changed, too, as on both sides of the trail tens of hundreds of thousands of blades of grass rose from the nothing like zombies freshly awakened from their graves, dragging daisies and dandelions and whatever else up with them. A stinging nettle brushed ever so slightly along the left of the two bare feet, but that only made their owner write even more furiously.
There was a bang, like a punctured aerosol can, followed by several more, heralding the arrival of numerous and unique bushes at random spaces on the grass. The writer, stimulated rater than distracted, continued his frantic scribbling in spite of this, even as a distant yet still deafening blast of thunder announced the birth of the tree line that blocked the horizon.
The scene rested for a second as the writer reached the bottom of his page and threw it aside to start on the second. Then the light brightened again, then dimmed, then brightened once more. White, ethereal threads intertwined to form clouds, and the sky around them faded into a hazy blue-orange color. Shadows fell from the trees, from the flowers, from the bushes, from the person whose eyes had yet to run themselves off the paper.
Another burst of thunder and a flash of lightning threw up a large lump of dirt that hit the ground as a cluster of grotesquely misshapen rocks of no particular size. It happened again, and a few more times until the rocks themselves lined a grass path parallel to its dirt counterpart. One of the rocks had hit the wordsmith in the leg, but he continued as though nothing had happened at all.
He seemed to stir for a second as, like the Red Sea, the grass path caved in until all that was left was a foot deep trench as dry as any teetotaler. Dismissing it as merely trivial, he kept on with his all important work, paying no attention to the schools of fish lining the trench and gasping for water. The sky seemed to hear their call, fortunately, and answered with a final clap of thunder, followed by a rain shower.
Having fulfilled its duty of filling the shallow basin, the rain ceased abruptly. No trace of it existed except for the dew sleeping on the petals of a handful of flowers that had their genesis in that downpour. A second quake struck, causing half the field, divided centrally by the stream, to drop several inches under the writer, who—finally stirred—stopped writing and took a good look at the scenery around him.
The sunset looked like it had been there forever; such a shame, the writer thought, that it had not. The waterfall crashed so peacefully it seemed to beckon him to dip his feet into its sub-arctic temperatures. A slight breeze whispered through the field, inciting all vegetation in its path to bow down and worship the receding sun that had nourished them with its warmth and love.
The tree, though, where this terrific display of creative power had begun, hit straight into the writer’s heart and soul. From the moment he had sat down, he had rested his back against something, and certainly something under him had to have been supporting his weight. There had not been nothing after all.
He stood, taking one final look at everything around him, then walked off down the path, sighing. He had created nothing. It had always been there. All he could do was put it to paper.
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