Evil Eyes was trying to enter their house. She sprinted for the open front door from the inside as he sprinted toward it from the out. But the twist was not the common one, that she could only run in place. She got to the door fast enough, before he did, but slamming it using the full force of her sprint, some invisible doorstop caught it before the jamb, holding it open just enough that he could wrap his bony fingers around the door’s edge. She pushed with all her might, but the gap held, and then his whole arm was through, and when he grabbed her wrist, she woke up.
+ + +
“It means nothing,” Miss Clough answered in her faint brogue when Beddy asked her about the word.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean ‘void.’ Itself. Come with me. We’ll look it up.”
They weaved past second graders in various states of unrest to the enormous hardbound dictionary she kept underneath her teacher desk. “I won’t ask you to lift it.” She heaved it onto the desk and began flipping through, licking the pages as she went. “Ah, here. Was it used as a verb or noun?”
Beddy put her thumb against her teeth. They just went over this recently.
“Noun.”
“Says here ‘an opening, a gap. Empty space. The quality or state of being without something.’ Does this sound right?”
She shook her head.
“Also says ‘a feeling of want or hollowness.’ Does this make sense in the context, er, the situation the person used it?”
It didn’t. None of it made sense. How could earth be empty space? Earth was anything but empty space. It was earth. Even when there were dinosaurs, and there were no people, or before dinosaurs, when it was volcanos, there was still something. Not life, but. And how could the void have “returned?” And what did this have to do with her mother?
“Where did you hear this word, Bedelia?”
“At the pizza place.”
+ + +
Hollowness.
Being without.
Brian showed up after work when they were clearing the dinner plates, and he served himself and sat in Dad’s easy chair.
Want.
These definitions still made no sense for the earth, but the longer she thought about them, the further that single word given to her by Evil Eyes reached. It meant nothing, but that nothing covered everything. She tried forming her own example sentences like Miss Clough’s dictionary might have. Not having a brother was a void. Dad moving out made her a void. The bullies at school gave her a void.
After a loud pounding on her door she opened it to find a figure standing in the hall.