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    Nothing Man
    Nothing Man
    Nothing Man
    Ebook88 pages1 hour

    Nothing Man

    By Marc Lowe

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    About this ebook

    "In Nothing Man, Marc Lowe presents a freak show of twitchy characters including relentlessly abused detectives, knife-wielding love-makers, over-caffeinated authoresses who steal into each others’ books, and an eccentric scholar whose ideas are so obscure that he himself vanishes into thin air. Lowe’s stories hack body and mind apart and sometimes put them back together in a new way. They disrupt comfortable logic and expectation with a Surrealist-infused Gothic prose tinged with hints of Borges and Poe."
    Rob Stephenson, author of Passes Through

    "Nothing Man is not just a collection of short stories. It is a collection of consequences within incidences placed within labyrinthine streets deep inside the whorls of the narrator’s, or the reader’s, mind... In pure abstract style, these stories represent the unraveling psyche in an Expressionist landscape..."

    Rachel Kendall, author of The Bride Stripped Bare

    "Physicists tell us there are “worm holes” in the universe through which you can cut your space travel time to near nothing or even enter new worlds. By dispensing with endless stretches of boring realism, riddling through the stories with his bold imagination, in his Nothing Man, Marc Lowe takes his readers on a whirlwind journey through the universe of life to visit characters you may not have imagined..."

    Yuriy Tarnawsky, author of Short Tails

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMarc Lowe
    Release dateMay 8, 2013
    ISBN9781301904730
    Nothing Man

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      Book preview

      Nothing Man - Marc Lowe

      Nothing Man: Fictions

      by Marc Lowe

      Copyright 2013 Marc Lowe

      Smashwords Edition

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold

      or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person,

      please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did

      not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to

      Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work

      of this author.

      Author's Note

      There were two criteria I used when choosing the fictions for inclusion in this ebook. The first was that they had all been written between the years 2011 and 2012. The second was that none of them had been previously published, either in print or online, so as to avoid any potential copyright issues. I dedicate this ebook to everyone who has ever felt that there is more to this world than meets the eye/I.

      Table of Contents

      The Eye

      In the Corridor

      Conviction

      The Face

      An Easy Job

      Carcass

      The Scholar

      A Man, Alone

      The Piggish Dreams of a Would-be Sinner

      An Empty Bowl

      Breathing

      The Murder Attempt

      Flicker

      The Girl in Brown

      Hector in Hell

      The Listener

      The Town

      The Man Without a Mouth

      Nothing Man

      Scarlet

      The Others

      Seven Grotesques

      Skin

      Exhaustion

      The Study of Professor Herbert Hand

      The Eye

      I. The eye

      I awoke one morning to find an eye staring at me from atop the covers. Whose eye it was I could not tell, but there was little doubt that it belonged to someone with whom I was well acquainted—there was something in its gaze that seemed rather familiar. I scooped the living eye up into the palm of my hand and brought it to the kitchen sink, where I rinsed it off (it was covered in a thick, vitreous goop) and had a better look at it, or perhaps you might say that it had a better look at me. Whose eye are you? I asked it, but, not having a mouth, it did not have the means to reply. I carried the eye back to my bedroom and changed into some clothing (quite self-consciously, for the eye was staring at me the entire time), and then put it in my pocket, where it squirmed about as if strangulated. Realizing that it must have been as good as blind there, I pulled it back out and attached it to the chain I wear around my neck with a medium-sized paper clip. Though it swung ever-so-gently back and forth when I walked, and though it couldn’t fully look up to gaze at my face as it had been doing before, I felt better knowing that at least it still had its sight, unlike when it had been in my pocket. Before leaving the apartment I did my regular check: gas burners, windows, handgun (which I have kept under my bed since I was 18, for self-protection), door locks. Everything seemed to be in its right place, and so off I went to work.

      II. The office

      When I got to the office, I received a lot of stares. I didn’t have to stare back, for the eye on my chain was perfectly capable of doing so for me. Though no one mentioned the eye, I knew that everyone was more-than-conscious of it dangling there like some perverse pendant around my neck. I sat down at my desk in silence and opened my computer, but when I did I found that my wallpaper had been changed from a scenic landscape in the Midwest to a smashed tomato! Was someone playing some sort of trick on me? Was today April 1st? (A quick glance at the calendar reminded me that the month was indeed May.) Apart from the wallpaper, everything else seemed relatively normal; I had work to do, and I did it without complaint: mechanically, precisely. The eye followed everything I did on the screen with what appeared to me to be great facility. Considering the fact that much of the information I was looking at was confidential, I was surprised that no one else protested, but I guess everyone was simply too embarrassed to mention the gelatinous thing that watched what I watched as I watched it.

      III. Home again

      After work, having felt the stares of my co-workers at my back when I left the office (though, admittedly, I always got stares on my way out of the office), I returned home to my apartment to find, as usual, that it was empty and quiet, and that all of the locks, windows, gas burners, and, of course, my gun were all as I’d left them. I first laid my briefcase down on the dining room chair. Then I removed the paper clip from the chain around my neck and put the eye on the dining room table. It immediately gave me that look that was at once both strange and familiar. I know you from somewhere, I said to the eye, but the eye could only blink in response. The fact was, I could not place that gaze—it neither belonged to my deceased wife nor to anyone else I could think of who was dead (my grandmother, for instance, or my best friend from technical school, Jimmy Scott, who had shot himself in the head, once having discovered that he had an incurable malady affecting his lungs and brain).

      IV. Loss

      As I cooked my dinner, the eye watched me with interest. I wanted more than anything to engage it in conversation but, as I’ve already said, it had no mouth. I often wished that I myself had no mouth; as you may have gleaned from that scene at the office, I don’t speak to others much, and when I do they tend to either ignore me or laugh at me. How wonderful, then, to be an eye without a mouth! I felt envious as I cooked my pasta with canned sauce, envious of the eye that looked at me with a sort of sadness I couldn’t quite fully comprehend. Whose eye are you? I asked again, fully expecting a mute response, but then, from my own mouth, burst forth the answer: I am yours. Haven’t you looked in the mirror lately? Surprised at my own outburst (this was the most I’d said all day), I realized that in fact I hadn’t looked at myself in a mirror today, not even once! I ran to the bathroom, leaving the eye on the dining room table, and glanced at my face in the mirror. Sure enough, I was missing one of my eyes; where it had once been was a deep, crimson red wound. Why hadn’t anyone at work said anything about it? I rushed back to the kitchen, but the eye was gone. I cried salty tears for it (my eyeless socket weeping watery drops of

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