I started this one so long ago that I think you’ve actually seen a draft of it from Ye Olde Forum days! Haven’t touched it in yonks, but I can’t let go of it. I did the classic “get up to a hard/uninspired spot, pause, then re-write it in a different POV instead of pushing through the plot difficulties”, but I still really like what I’ve got to start with so I’m keeping it in case I find myself in a place to pick it up again.
This is a story about a young girl (9yo) who feels a physical/emotional/spiritual pull towards this strange spot a little way away from her house. It’s down a path through the woods and along the creek, and she feels like if she could just get to this Nothing, this Nowhere, there would be ... something.
She lives in a world of magic, but she doesn’t resonate with it at all - at least, not with doing it. Maybe just with whatever’s going on over in the Nowhere.
I think I used to be a better writer than I currently am - there are a lot of things about this excerpt that I like that I don’t really do anymore. I should look into that, lol. Excerpt under the cut:
The Nowhere was particularly feisty today. Matty’s feet skimmed over the ground as she ran down to the creek, arms windmilling to keep balance. With a jolt, she came to a stop at the edge of the creek’s banks. Her legs wobbled like a taut string as she pulled back and the Nowhere beckoned her forward.
The bush behind Matty’s house was thick and tangled, bursting open onto a clearing just as Matty had moments earlier. Patches of grass were squashed and bent where she had trampled them, the path stopping at the top of an edge, where it was ready to take a drop down into the warm mud below on the creek’s banks. Even on cold days, and even when the creek filled its banks, the mud was warm beneath Matty’s toes, squeezing up onto her feet – warm with magic.
The creek was brown with dirt and an untidy row of stones swept down the middle, not across, but along the length of the creek, guiding it down the field and round the corner where reeds and long grass lined the banks.
It was the creek to Nowhere.
Mama would ask Matty, “Where are you going?” as Matty rushed out the door.
“Nowhere.”
And so it was. The creek bubbled along easily until it stopped quite suddenly and the Nowhere began. Like an invisible door, the Nowhere rose up out of the water, blocking Matty’s path. She could see through it, and around it, but as hard as she pushed and prodded, she could never get past. And as long as it remained shut, it was just nowhere.
The stones in the creek were soft with moss, but the Nowhere wanted visitors, so even when she ran over them, splashing all along the pathway, Matty didn’t slip. It was when she began to dawdle or turned in the wrong direction that the stones were slippery. They slid and spun beneath her feet, trying to topple her, so that she found herself unbalancing into the water again and again. Those times Matty had to sneak back home, eyeing past every corner so that Mama didn’t find how wet she’d gotten. Every time she left the Nowhere unfound, unsearched, unexplored, it was with a sense of resignation that the two of them shared.
Matty scrambled down the cliff, exploring the muddy banks with her eyes. Bubbles drifted to the surface from the holes bugs and crablets made, making little chimneys for their homes.
Looking past her windied hair and the grass stain that had just now appeared on her dress, she hardly looked like the type for adventure. The expressionless nature of her mouth combined fiercely with flat eyebrows and perpetually unsurprised eyes. Together with the roundness of her face it lent an air of sullenness to an otherwise normal-looking child. In behaviour, as far as nine-year-olds went she was well boring in comparison with her classmates, who laughed and shouted and played games loudly, swapping love and hate with equal ferocity. Compared with the other children, she was placid and unfeeling – Little Matty who didn’t laugh at anything and whose frowns were of confusion, not of anger. They didn’t see her at these times, when the Nowhere was at work, calling to her from the inside out. They didn’t see the curious determination shining quietly in her eyes.
The entrance would be somewhere close by, of that Matty was sure. The encounter with the Man made her certain.
Only a week earlier she had been in the same place, deciding whether or not to risk the journey through the creek before Mama came to find her, when she saw a man heedlessly approaching from the other side of the creek. Layers of clothing peeked out from each other, the collar of a shirt sticking out from under a jumper, which was under a cardigan, which itself was under a scratchy brown scarf mostly covered up by the lapels of his black coat. His trousers had a hole in the knee, but that hardly mattered because there was another pair beneath them. The black top hat he wore was browned with dirt and ragged where the top stuck out like a can of open spaghetti. There was beard all over his chin and up on his cheeks, like the sort Matty’s Papa had grown to look fancy for his job at the bank.
He had stopped at the top of the bank opposite, where Matty told him that he looked funny.
He said he was cold, not funny.
Matty never got cold. Or hot. Not like other people did.
“I’m just like other people, then …” His eyes looked far away, deep into the bush behind her and closer than his nose at the same time. He said he came from somewhere where it was hotter and since he’d only just arrived he had to make do with what he’d found. Apart from the shirt and one pair of trousers, which he said had a hole in them on account of his having fallen when he arrived, it had all been hanging up in some fields near the buildings.
The buildings he mentioned must have been further along, but wherever he had found them it was all the same. Matty made sure to tell him that she expected he’d taken it from someone’s clothesline and that was stealing and was wicked behaviour.
“Oh. It was wrong to take things,” he said, taking off the hat and staring into it. A repentant curve sat uncomfortably in the corners of his mouth. “Now I feel sorry for making a hole in this hat. I just needed to let the smoke out.”
And Matty noticed that there was indeed smoke coming out of his head. It coiled out in a small wisp, growing like a watery ghostly grey hair that disappeared before it finished.
“Is your head on fire?” she asked.
The man explained that that was what people’s heads did where he came from, but only when they weren’t working properly.
Matty asked why, and where he came from.
“The Land Beyond the Door,” he said.
And the Door was nearby.
The Nowhere woke up in Matty’s mind. All this time, it had been a game of sorts to find the Nowhere, to find what it wanted, where it led her to, but now it was something more. The Nowhere opened, somehow. It spat people out from a hot world, where people weren’t taught that stealing was wrong, and there were fires in their heads instead of their words. The Nowhere opened. Just not to Matty.
