The Window on the Top Floor By B.C. Witmer

The dog abandons me to another room, and I’m alone with the sky, but it doesn’t look blue or even yellow like it’s supposed to. It’s a white wall of Nothing. It is resplendent and terrible, as if Nothing was trying to fill up my room like a rising tide, gradually pushing me into a corner, where I’ll hold my last breath — as one always does before drowning — and savor it like the last spoonful of dessert; and when my lungs finally burst, I’ll heave Nothing in and out of my chest, and it will fill my body and replace my organs with its radiant self. There’s a humming in my ears like the sound numbness makes, and I’m not sure that I’ve been swallowed whole save for the faint glow of Nothing under my skin.

A cloud drags across the window and somehow it’s whiter than the white Nothing beyond it. A thumb over a camera lens, it ruins the Nothing, and I’m myself again with my organs returned and skin that doesn’t glow. I rub my eyes, and like flashes of lightning, I see the neon white square of Nothing framed in dark windowpanes dancing across the walls and floor, a temporary tattoo of light on my retinas that fades with time and shadow and the lick of a tongue on my cheek, the thud of a tail against my knee.

How easily there is Something to keep me here.

© 2016 B.C. Witmer

B.C. Witmer is co-editor of the 99 Pine Street literary journal (99PineStreet.com). She has been previously published in The Golden Key, Whole Beast Rag, Xenith, and elsewhere. Her work was also featured in the 2015 No You Tell It! reading series in NYC.

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