Hollow Spaces

Hollow Places

            Go ahead, darling. Ask me your question.

            No, there is no such thing as “empty space.”

            Leave a place empty long enough, and they’ll come. They’ll fill it. Usually three months is long enough, but they grow stronger in the places that are untouched. They live in the basements of old industrial parks, behind the dark windows of unattended storefronts and the boarded up holes of abandoned gas-stations in the middle of nowhere.

            And woods.

            They like woods the best.

            What’s that? You’ve never seen one? Of course not, why would you? Think, child! If you were as old as they were, as strong as they were, would you let yourself be seen either? Hell no! Especially not be some wide-eyed little thing like you. Just because you’ve never seen one doesn’t mean they aren’t real.

            You’ve never even heard of one?

            Oh, I promise you. You have.

            When you leave the grocery store, you see a wall of faces. A little wall of colorful, bright faces with sad little poems next to them. “Missing. Missing. Please find me.” It’s sad really, they might as well be asking to turn back time. They’re not in the custom of giving things back. Especially not little things like you.

            Oh but they don’t only go for the little ones. Ever noticed that sometimes a homeless man, a homeless woman, will just up and disappear one day? That’s why they don’t stick around here often, while they always move up and down this coast looking for some public place to sleep so that they aren’t left alone in the lonely places. The hungry, dark corners of our city.

            I say “dark” but I don’t mean “without light.” I mean “uninhabited.” The places we don’t keep, we give to them.

            What do they look like?

I’m not rightly sure. I suppose they don’t look like anything. Or they look completely normal, common place enough for us to believe that what we are seeing is just a normal man, a normal dog or cat but what really is in front of us is the impending claws of old space.

            Where do they come from?

            Outer space. I mean, think about it. They have to. So much of what is out there is completely empty, there’s no light between stars or planets so it only makes sense that these things dive down from space and wedge themselves in the rotting floorboards of homes. And to think, we’re actually sending people up.

            How do we stop them?

            We don’t.

            We can’t stop the sun from rising, the earth from spinning, the tides from moving. They’re just as natural of a part of the ecosystem as we are. More natural even, since they’ve been here longer. More than anything they’ve become an environmental redundancy, a check on us so we cannot refill the places we’ve left. Otherwise we would fill up the whole planet and just leave it cracked open for the next space-faring people to fill up. And even then, they would still be here.

            Come now child, please don’t be scared.

            It doesn’t help to be afraid of what you cannot see or stop. It’s a useless fear, just like being afraid of death. We all die, all things die. And unlike death you can even help, you can even avoid them. Just don’t go into empty places, don’t leave anything too long. Should you be unfortunate enough to ever have to go somewhere hollow, somewhere old, bring a friend. Preferably a slow one.

            After all, they travel fast, but they can’t carry much.