Nothing Became Me By James Coffey

For a long time we didn’t know anything was happening. Later we thought something was happening but didn’t know what. Whatever it was seemed so slow and incremental that it didn’t feel as though anything was actually happening. We weren’t sure what to do so we didn’t do anything except sometimes look at one another and then look away.

When we thought things were getting worse we told ourselves we were experiencing premonitions. Deep inside I know that premonitions are founded on experience and are probably true. So things were probably getting worse. Regardless, we carried on doing nothing. Sometimes I think that we didn’t do anything in case we found out that nothing could be done.

Anyway, we did nothing and carried on doing nothing until it became obvious that matters had progressed so far there was nothing we could do. All of the slow incremental changes had joined together somewhere to form a totality of change that was deep and dark and fundamental and contradicted everything we thought we knew about anything. I stared into the emptiness, doing nothing. I did nothing because there was nothing I could do and the nothing that I did became something that could withstand everything.

© 2014 James Coffey

James Coffey lives with his wife in Warwickshire, England. He looks after a big garden and tries to write small fiction. He has been published in Dogzplot, Molotov Cocktail, Ink, Sweat & Tears and Linnet’s Wings.

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