The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

means. Nice, though. She spent her whole break driving to Starbucks down in the plaza for salted caramel lattes. One day, Owen decided to be nice. Not flirty or sexual. Nice. He stopped by on his way into work and picked one up for her. He brought it to her, and as he was holding it out to her: bam. Spilled all over Amanda’s uniform. He practically pitched it at her. Twenty ounces of hot sweetened milk over the front of her shirt and her jeans. Everyone laughed except Amanda. Amanda screamed at him. In the concourse, in front of everyone in the mall.

Owen whom no one noticed, Owen whom no one trusted lost it.

“You think you’re so fucking special?” he screamed at her. “You think you’re hot shit?” His insides were a tangle of anger and sadness. His stomach roiled with something that wasn’t different from hunger. He held his hands out to Amanda, who stepped back from him. “I was just trying to be nice,” he said, pleading.

Amanda was three feet away when it happened. It came pouring out of his gut, white and cold. Time slowed, dilated, and Owen watched the edge of a sphere of nothing expand to include Amanda Smoot. It nipped away the tip of her nose, leaving a dark red circle like she’d dipped it in the Blast-Off barbecue sauce. The circle got larger, covering the whole nose, the high appley rounds of her cheekbones. It shaved away Amanda the way the mandoline they used to make the Planet’s fresh-fried chips sliced at a potato. It exposed bright red layers of her insides, leaving less with each pass until there was barely enough of Amanda to press against the imaginary blade. Owen saw the heel of her sneaker on the tile floor, a nub of bone, skin, and blood inside it, then only rubber and leather. Then that was gone, too. Then the tiles. Then the food court.

Owen came to a second later in the first-floor hallway, between a Pacific Sun and a Build-A-Bear. Above him, he could see a circle cut through the food court, through the ceiling above it. The sky was milky with clouds. He scrabbled to his feet and bolted for the nearest exit. In the parking lot, he sat in his car, listening to sirens approach. His heart raced, but he felt drowsy, like after a big Thanksgiving dinner. A heavy downward pull. Owen Curry’s mind tumbled backward. He fell through the shimmering room, with its endless ghostly partygoers, and landed like a feather in a different room. It was as small and cramped as his bedroom, but it was clean. Instead of pale pink, the walls looked like they’d been carved out of black bone. A man sat in a chair made out of the same stuff, leaning back as if he’d been waiting for Owen. He looked like radio static sounds, like a plastic bag full of wasps. When he spoke, his voice bounced off the walls. It echoed in Owen’s skull.

Owen Curry, he said. You are so important. You are so special.

“No, I’m not,” Owen said.

You are, said the man. That’s why you’re here. Only special people can come here. Only people with a certain vibration in them. Not many people have it. One in a thousand. But you do. It’s what gives you your ability.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Owen said. “I don’t know what just happened.”

Tell me something, said the man. Are you hungry? Are you always hungry?

Owen had to admit he was. There was something inside him, a void.

That’s it, said the man. That’s your ability. You take the emptiness inside you and let it out.

The man laid his hand on Owen’s cheek. It felt like a rubber glove full of beetles, but Owen held it there, savoring the way the surface of the man’s palm twitched against his skin. Then he fell again, upward, coming back to his car. Police cars and ambulances raced by, headed to the other side of the mall, the hole that Owen Curry had ripped in the world. Owen drove home with the radio off, hearing his friend’s words.

You are so important. You are so special.

When he got home, Owen looked at his house as if it had appeared from nowhere. It was neither important nor special. Another shithole in Seat Pleasant, Maryland. Shitty house in a shitty town, home of Owen’s formerly shitty life. The back door slammed shut behind him as he went in, a cue for his mother to start in on him.

“What’d, you get lost?” she said. “It doesn’t take half an hour to get home from that fancy-assed mall. If you can’t come straight ho—”

Conscious of it this time, reaching a decision and acting on it, Owen fed her to the null. He found it in his gut and brought it forth, an egg-shaped void that extended from his midsection and swallowed everything where she and her chair had been. A bite was missing from the Formica table. Owen was alone in the kitchen. James Taylor’s thin treble still sang about going to Carolina. Owen fed his mother’s phone to the null, a quick blip of nothing. The house was finally quiet. He went into the living room and sat on the couch, enjoying the silence. Then he turned on the news. They were at the mall, talking about terrorists and bombs.

The television clicked off.

“You’ve done an amazing thing, Owen,” said a voice from the kitchen. “I am so proud of you.”

Owen jumped off the couch. The man was more solid than in the black bone room, but his face was like the surface of the grease in the deep fryer waiting for an order to drop. It wavered and bubbled, iridescent. “You can’t stay here,” he said. “They’ll find you. I have a place you can go to hide.”

“Why are you helping me?” Owen asked.

“Because I’m your friend,” said the man.

His friend gave him gifts. A bus ticket