The Licorice Girl: On "Nothing"

        It was a still, hot summer day and the air smelled of sand. The smell of scorching hot sand on a beach in the middle of July. A girl skipped quickly on her tiptoes as she passed over an asphault sidewalk. She flipped her two braids to one side of her neck as she hopped onto a sun-bleached orange swing. She winced as the back of her bare thighs met the hot, leathery material.

    "Ouch! Happens every time..." The girl pulled a long cord of red licorice out of her shirt pocket and stuck it in the corner of her mouth. She was chewing it slowly, methodically, when a young girl, about eleven, skipped up to the swing set.

      "Hey Byrdie, wanna play house over at Donna's?"

       "Nah." Byrdie, the girl on the swing, replied.

        "Well what are you doing?"

        "Nothing." She swung higher. 

The other girl walked away, tight ponytail bobbing. Byrdie started talking to herself, very quietly at first, but soon, anybody passing by would be able to hear her.

        "Nothin'. Nothin's a funny word ain't it. I said I wasn't doing nothin' but I was. I was, and still am, swinging on a swing and eating a red vine. No one wants to hear me say that to them though 'cause they can already see it. Even the word 'nothing' has got seven letters, so it's got something. And even if we wrote nothing on a page as a blank, in other words not write it, the paper would take place of the word, and I myself would read: 'Oh. Hi, nope. I'm doin' paper.' If I was writing it down of course, but what about a vacuum? Teacher says there's nothin' in a vacuum, but there is! Dust, dog hair, and paper clips. An occasional sock. And if I said I was talking about nothing it would be true, since I am talking 'bout nothing, just the somethin' nothin'. But if this is something-nothing, then what is nothing-nothing, and something-something?" 

The girl slowed the swing to a stop by dragging her bare feet in the dust. She swallowed the last of her licorice, and hopped over to some grass and began to walk home. A middle-aged woman walked out onto her patio.

            "Whatcha doing Byrdie?"

Byrdie swung her head over, braids flying, to look across the street. She began to speak-

            "Ah, na-" she stopped, eyebrows furrowed, and kept walking with a thoughtful look on her face.

  Ironic, how that day, everyone in that tiny town, was saying :

           "Byrdie's up to something."

©Altari