The print edition of For Four Players is now for sale, as a print-on-demand paperback from my CreateSpace store at Amazon. The print edition includes all four stories from the eBook as well as a fifth short story, NoThing, which was also previously published alone in eBook format.
Order it here - https://www.createspace.com/3815054
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NoThing
a story by Tommie Lee
Published by T.L. Closson, Jr. writing as Tommie Lee
Distributed by Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Tommie Lee Closson, Jr.
ISBN 978-1-4580-5079-3
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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If you enjoy this free story, please consider reading more work by this author:
Also by Tommie Lee
Both titles are available at Smashwords and other online retailers.
Learn more at http://tkcbooks.com
*****
NoThing
She woke up, naked but not chilled, and convinced she had stopped short of a hangover and sauntered back instead towards drunk.
The room held nothing. The room was not a room. It was an empty space, blank whiteness, a clean slate of uncompromised absence. It was as if some giant artist had painted her, three-dimensional, onto a blank sheet of paper without any background.
She had fallen asleep in her favorite bedclothes: the faded blue Troy Aikman jersey her father had given her as a teenager and her old gym shorts from college volleyball. They were also gone. Her bed, her bureau, her hope chest…the room itself: everything was gone. There was nothing but…nothing.
Convinced that she was still dreaming, she decided to stay with this and see where it took her. Not that she appeared to have much of a choice in the matter. She weighed her options with every step she took, her feet touching a clean white floor identical to the walls around her. She began her usual mental pro-con list. It was what she did when trying to find her place in any situation, an old trick she’d learned from her Grandmother.
There were no phone calls from the bill collectors here, because there was no phone and no stack of overdue bills. She wouldn’t have to meet Chris’s parents for dinner tonight. A world of nothing might not be so bad.
It was also very peaceful and quiet, which was something of a pro and a con, as she typically needed background noise to help her focus on things. In this strange, sterile new world, however, there were no backgrounds of any kind. What there was a whole lot of naked self to focus on. So she stopped walking for a moment, looked down, and became very critical of herself. It was what she did in the mirror every day, but at least here she didn’t have much of a view of herself. There was no mirror, nothing to protect herself with. Assuming anyone else happened to be here with her.
The more she thought about it, the more she wasn’t all that impressed with this bill-free world after all.
She began to walk. She wasn’t sure which direction she was moving in, because there didn’t seem to be any directions. There wasn’t a down, because she was walking on a floor. And there only appeared to be so much up before the ceiling dissolved into a sort of haze, like a thick fog or a cloud. Right now, looking up, was the first time she’d noticed that. She didn’t have her contacts in, and it was hard to see far away.
So she walked, naked as the day she was born, across the floor that felt so smooth and comfortable against the rough soles of her feet. She knew she had put lotion on them before she went to bed, after attacking them with the lufa. Now the lotion, the lufa, and the familiar greasy feeling on her feet were all gone.
She didn’t seem to think much over the next few minutes, if that was what they were, before she started to notice the fog approaching from her left. The walls were no longer visible anywhere, just an expanse of nothing. Her mind hadn’t even registered when the walls had ended, and when she looked back…she couldn’t see them anywhere.
She stopped.
The fog was oddly comforting: it was the first real, tangible thing she had seen here other than the floor. It was a Thing in a place without Things, and therefore, it was something other than her own nakedness to focus on.
It continued to approach her. If she moved towards it, it seemed to rush at her twice as fast. It would slow again if she stopped.
Goose pimples ran up and down her arms. The first cold chill in this windless place crossed over her soul and filled her with a feeling of dread and despair as she watched it move towards her.
She thought about it for a moment and decided to try and back away from it; to see if that would keep it at bay. She matched the pace of the advancing fog, and sure enough, it appeared to stay the same distance away from her.
She smiled, and turned around to walk away fom this oh-so accommodating fog. She was met by another huge wall of it, which had been only a few feet behind her, approaching from the opposite direction.
It passed right through her, and she gasped as if expecting some form of monster to be hiding within it. But it was just a smoky fog, moving around her. It didn’t even have an odor or moisture.
She stopped and turned around. The fog that hit her was moving away. The other, more distant wall of fog swept towards it and the spot where she was standing.
Where to go? The fog was moving around now. She started to run away from both the coming fog and the fog that had just passed her. After a few seconds she stopped running…because she wasn’t particularly happy with the way certain parts of her body were flapping around. It didn’t matter that no one else was seeing it…she was. And she was feeling it. And it made her realize she wasn’t going to outrun the fog.
But the fog had already overtaken her once, and nothing came of it. So…why fight it? There was just too much to think about, and no background noise of any kind to help her focus on it all.
So she sank to her knees, sitting on her heels with her toes bent onto the floor, and for the first time began to truly feel cold and alone.
She sat flat on the strange floor after what could have been a few minutes to rest. The floor, though still comfortably warm, felt uncomfortable to sit on without clothing around her nether-regions and her crack. The human body, especially that general area, presses itself flat in odd ways without some form of covering to guard it against a hard surface. She was just thankful it wasn’t cold.
The fog she had originally tried to avoid finally passed over her, and she began to cry: softly at first, and then in gasping, whispering sobs. She felt her bottom lip quiver like the gearshift in the old truck she’d learned to drive a stick in. She couldn’t help but laugh with a sniffle at the thought that the old truck didn’t exist anymore, either.
Boredom swept over her like the two waves of fog had done, and she found herself wishing for her smartphone. At least she could open up her eBook app and finish that novel she’d downloaded last week. Or try to call someone. Or hope the alarm would wake her up from this odd, sterile purgatory.
“Hello?”
The voice made her snap her head around so quickly that she hurt her neck. She jumped up to her feet, instinctively positioning her arms to cover herself.
A lone figure was moving towards her, slowly fading into her blurry vision. As the subject neared, she saw it was a naked man. He was holding his hands in a protective way, for he was as naked as she was.
There was nothing to hide behind. There was nowhere to go. She decided to wait for him there and hope for the best.
He was very dark-skinned, with Asian features and dark black hair. He seemed every bit as embarrassed about being naked as she was. As he approached, he nodded to her by way of salutation, unwilling to move either hand from in front of his crotch.
“Hello. I’m Arvan.”
She nodded back, “Penny.”
They shared a moment of silence, and then she added, “Nice to meet you. Where in the hell are we, Arvan?”
“I don’t know. I was only in bed for a couple of hours. I had a class this morning at ACU. A final. I was up until three or so studying for it because I had trouble sleeping during the storm.”
“That’s right,” Penny said, “it was storming when I went to bed. I think it was about 1:30 or so, right after Ferguson signed off.”
“And I woke up here with nothing around me at all, not even what I fell asleep in.”
“Me neith —“
“Hello?”
This was a new voice, female this time, and they both peered into the nothingness in the direction of the original fog she had spotted.
The silhouette of a woman, slightly rounder than Penny, padded slowly towards them across the stark whiteness. They said nothing in reply but stayed where they were, covering their nakedness from each other.
Arvan’s face contorted a bit, his lips jerking to one corner of his mouth as they always did when he was doing his deepest thinking.
“I’ve seen two sets of fog and passed through them. Each one has now proven to have had a person behind it.”
“Yeah, me too,” agreed Penny with a confused sigh. She needed noise to think straight. She’d never realized how important noise was to her until the world seemed to have ran out of it.
The woman was within speaking distance now. Penny recognized her from somewhere, possibly the athletic club where she did her yoga. She was trying to picture the woman in spandex, and failing. Either way, she felt a bit better about her own body. At least she was in better shape than this girl. It wasn’t a particularly nice thing to think nor was she proud of it, but the thought was there. And having something, anything to have a thought about was a vast improvement over the time she’d spent up until Arvan and this woman had shown up. Something was preferable to nothing, even if the something was petty and rude.
“I’m Penny. This is Arvan. We don’t know what’s going on. Do you?”
“I’m Stacy, and no. Pleased to meet you. In fact…I’m glad as hell to see you.” She said this, and even sounded convincing…but the crimson blush of her skin suggested she was mortified to be naked in front of two complete strangers.
“Did you walk through the fog twice?” blurted Arvan, by way of saying hello. Women had never been his forte. His forte typically involved test-tubes and chemicals and impressing professors with his ability to keep explosive things from exploding until they were supposed to.
“Yeah. Why?”
Arvan, forgetting for a moment that he was naked, ran his fingers through his black hair and rubbed his temples, before crossing his arms with his right hand up to gesture with. “It sounds like each of us is surrounded by a wide circle of fog. We passed through each other’s circles and have come together. If…”
He noticed his audience wasn’t exactly focused on his face as he spoke. His hands quickly dropped to his crotch. Penny and Stacy remarked quietly in their own minds that uncircumcised penises did, in fact, look very different.
“I’m sorry. If we stick together, we might be better prepared in case we encounter another group who has mischief in mind, yes?”
The ladies, who hadn’t exactly stumbled onto any better options, nodded.
“Which way should we go?” coughed Stacy, still trying to get the image of Arvan’s penis out of her mind. “I can save us the trouble and say there’s nothing back that way for quite a-ways.”
“And Arvan, you came the same way I did, from further back. There’s nothing there, either.”
Arvan didn’t respond. He was staring behind the girls, watching a thin layer of fog come into view, slowly.
They both turned to see it, and even though Penny couldn’t focus on it or truly gauge how far in the distance it was…she got the gist of what they were staring at.
She pointed over Arvan’s shoulder, careful not to reveal so much as a nipple.
“I think that way.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Stacy assented. Arvan nodded.
“I suppose,” he said, “that I should be a gentleman and offer to walk in the lead, so I’m not staring at your backsides, yes?”
Penny laughed, and Stacy smiled and said: “That would be nice, yes. Plus, this way we can stare at yours.”
“Funny,” he smiled, “that in a world full of nothing, there should still be a double-standard between the sexes.”
They all shared a nervous laugh, and began to walk.
It may have been a few hours; it may have been a day. Their feet never got sore, they never felt tired.
They made a few course-corrections here and there to avoid oncoming fog walls. But eventually, they ran out of directions to evade other people and passed through two walls of fog that were coming at diagonals on either side ahead of them. There would have been no way to avoid them without retracing their own steps and walking into the path of someone they had already avoided.
Arvan was counting the seconds using the old trusty “one thousand one, one thousand two” method that every kid masters while playing hide-and-seek in worlds that actually have trees and buildings to play around. He was trying to measure how long it took for someone to appear after the fog crossed their path.
It was roughly three minutes by his counting before two people appeared at the far end of their visibility on the left. Then came another on the right, at a sharper angle. As they drew nearer, it was obvious that they, too, were all naked. The two on the left, though, were walking hand-in-hand and appeared to be a man and a woman. The figure on the right was still too far away to discern his or her sex, but another wall of fog was visible, following the person.
The couple approached first and waved with their free hands, obviously very comfortable in their altogether. His hair was just as long as hers, and Penny guessed that if anyone here had any possessions this couple would have plenty of beads and matching tie-dyed shirts on.
“Hello! You guys okay?”
Arvan’s eyes darted back and forth between the guy’s face and the one spot he really, really didn’t want to be looking at but couldn’t help it.
“Hardly,” he managed, “do you have any idea where we are?”
“Nope,” the new woman replied.
“Nope,” the new man parroted. “Was gonna ask you the same thing. I’m Jay. This is Laura.” Laura waved and smiled. The three of them blinked at how lovely she was, and Penny began to feel self-conscious about her body again even with Stacy there to quietly, unwittingly boost her self-image.
“You goin’ that way?”
“We seem to be,” Stacy whispered, trying hard not to stare at the incredible gift God had blessed Jay with when he reached puberty.
“Nothin’ back there, man. I’m guessin’ there ain’t nothin’ back your way either, right?”
Penny, adjusting her arms as if they could possibly cover her a bit more, shook her head by way of response.
“Hello?” This was Arvan, in the direction of the person up ahead on their right
The person approaching from their right was within shouting distance now, his or her sex still up in the air. This was a very large person. Finally, as she approached, it was obvious that she was covering both her waist and a hairless chest, so that answered that question.
She said nothing, and just kept walking. She arced her path a bit to steer clear of them, staring straight ahead as if in a daze.
“Yo! You okay?” Jay called after her, but she continued along, indifferent. Without a word, Laura kissed Jay gently on the cheek, let go of his hand for the first time since they’d arrived and bolted after the woman.
“That’s Laura. She has to save the whole world, you know? She’s a counselor in the regular world. Wherever the hell that is, right?”
They stood in silence for a moment, all but Penny having turned to watch Laura try to get through to the large woman without success. Penny watched the very slow advance of the next cloud that had been following her.
Finally, Laura gave up and returned.
“Wow. She’s like REALLY gone. She’s way in her own head. Can’t say that I blame her with whatever this is that’s going on, but man! Totally locked away, and just walking.”
“The fog that was following her is almost here,” Penny pointed, and they all turned to look.
“Do we keep going, or do we move away from it?” Stacy wondered aloud.
Arvan took it a step further. “I wonder if we experience each other’s fog circles at the exact same times…if they’re all the exact same distance around us. Is that possible?”
“Is any of this possible, really?” The question was Jay’s way of answering. “I mean, we can’t all be dreaming the same dream, can we? I know me an’ Laura are real people who went to bed. We didn’t even take anything before this weird-ass wake-up. Are we all dreaming the same dream? And if we are…how are we all in the same place, having the same dream with each other? And why are we all nude?”
“Imagine no possessions. I wonder if you can.”
They all turned to look at Stacy as she said this.
“Lennon,” Penny said. “I was named for the song Penny Lane. My folks loved The Beatles.”
“No possessions, no things anywhere. No things. Not even a world,” replied Jay. “Good call, Stacy.”
The fog strolled past them as casually as anything. Behind it, another wall was approaching at a steady pace.
“That one is probably what’s-her-name’s other wall, the one that would be behind her,” Arvan observed, again forgetting his nakedness and running his hands through his hair. Penny noticed he always did this when thinking. She’d abandoned any thoughts of reminding him about it.
“Well, I’m thinking we’ll probably keep going this way. If that girl ever snaps out of it…she’s gonna need some friendlies around her, y’know?” Jay smiled, and Laura held his hand tight, nodding. Her long, straight hair danced about her face as she did so, and Penny suddenly imagined the girl at a park in San Francisco in the mid-60’s, dropping acid and listening to The Dead launch into Dark Star, dancing with her eyes closed. The visual made her smile, because it had things in it. Things that felt like they’d almost never existed now.
Jay reached out to hug Penny, and she froze as his giant wand brushed against her leg, her body blushing, and her temperature rising a bit as the blood travelled to her face. Stacy got one too, and Arvan got a hug from Laura he wouldn’t soon forget. And then they went their separate ways.
There was no way to know how long they had been walking. There wasn’t even any discomfort on their feet from the smooth floor they strode across: something for which Penny was especially thankful for.
For the first time, as they walked together in silence, she realized that she had become less self-conscious about her nakedness. She noticed the same was true of Stacy and Arvan, too. They were becoming comfortable with each other on a level she would never have expected. Perhaps it was the lack of any other options. There wasn’t any place to hide, so had to simply had to drop their misgivings and accept things for what they were.
At the same time, she was wondering just exactly what the hell they were walking on. It wasn’t marble, concrete, tile, or limestone…the floor defied definition.
“The floor. The walls.” Penny said this as if answering a question no one had asked.
Arvan looked at Penny. “What did you say?”
“When you first started walking, were there walls? I mean, when you woke up?”
Arvan thought for a moment. “Yeah, actually, there were.”
“Me too,” Stacy added. “I was in a room until I started moving. At some point, my walls disappeared.”
“Mine too.”
“Mine too,” Arvan agreed. “A maze without walls? Is this some kind of puzzle?”
Penny noticed fog closing in on them up ahead and to the right. As she turned to tell them, she saw another wall coming from the left.
“Fog coming from all three directions now,” she said.
“Make that four,” corrected Stacy, pointing behind them where indeed another wall was rolling across the label-less white floor.
“Listen!” Arvan growled, a little more curtly than had been his intention. His nerves were on edge, and in an instant, the girls knew why.
The fog had brought a new kind of sound with it. Not so much just footfalls or footsteps but a large chorus of feet.
From all directions a symphony of people were approaching. The nothing was about to fill with people, and there was nowhere to go to avoid them.
The sound was thick enough to drown out the sudden pounding of their own pulse in each of their ears. All three of their hearts seemed to be pounding on the edge of leaping out of their chests.
High above them, watching through the fog, their gray-skinned captors traded interested looks with one another and continued to tap notes onto tiny glass screens.
THE END
Praise for Mulligan by Tommie Lee
Mulligan is one of those good books that you’ll want to finish over the course of a couple nights, and revisit once you’ve put it in your collection.
- Andrew Frame, Florida, contributing editor to Radio And Production Magazine
Tommie Lee has created a fascinating futuristic world. You will get lost in Antarctica, and you will enjoy the ride.
- Hollie Ayres, Michigan, librarian
…(Mulligan) kept me seated in front of my computer long after I should have been sleeping.
- Mark Spurrier, Indiana
I was glued to my laptop - I couldn’t put it down. Very creative and compelling…I have passed the link on to some friends. Hope you will grace us with another!
- Deann Hagler, Toronto
Praise for For Four Players by Tommie Lee
Each of the stories pull you in and challenge you to hang on for the ride! From the visceral reaction to “Ghoul” to the “Rocket Man”-like emptiness and hope in “Ten Years Gone”. The intricate and spiritual twists of “The Mayor of Seventeenth Avenue” and the guilt-ridden escape of “Continental Highway”, Tommie Lee’s storytelling does not disappoint! As each of the stories’ end became apparent, I found myself wishing for more, only to find each ending perfect. I cannot recommend “For Four Players” highly enough!
- Shelley Morgan, Indiana
Four very excellent stories. Each is very different from the others and really draws you into the scene so that you feel as if you are actually there as an eyewitness. These were subjects that I normally would not choose to read, but right away from the beginning I was pulled in and wanted to keep reading to find out what would happen next.
- Amber Topp, Michigan
About The Author
Tommie Lee has worked in radio, with varying degrees of success, since 1988. Before that, he thought he was a musician. Before any of that, he was writing fiction in his bedroom on his mother’s old typewriter and a C64. Now, he is married with two teenagers, a cat, and a dog: all of whom tolerate the incessant typing. He wants a new laptop.
Connect with Tommie
You can find him online at http://iamtommielee.com, which also has links to his narcissistic ramblings on twitter (iamwritebrained) and facebook (tlclossonjr).
He welcomes your feedback at tealsea@gmail.com. Even if you’re just telling him to never write again. Which won’t work, by the way.
Visit his Smashwords page: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/TommieLee. If you liked this story, please consider posting a review.
You are also very, very encouraged to read more. Smashwords also distributes For Four Players, a collection of short stories by Tommie Lee, and was the first place to carry his full-length novel, Mulligan.
You can learn more, including where to find the book at other online retailers, at http://tkcbooks.com.
My eBooks are available at the Amazon Kindle store, the Barnes & Noble NOOKbook store, and for just about every other device imaginable (including PDF files for your computer if you have no eReader) at Smashwords.
Also: the story you just read is available as a FREE download at Smashwords.com.
