There was once a man who lived on a flat geometric plane slick as ice and grey as slate. The plane was situated next to a kidney-shaped abyss the size of a small pool.

He had a small shed next to it and sometimes he went fishing in it for things.

Sometimes he went swimming in it, but never for long. For who knows what manner of creatures lurk in the depths of an abyss?

At night, sweating feverishly, he dreamt of the abyss.

Its dark foreboding surface that never rocked, was never disturbed by waves.

By day, its serene surface allowed him to bask next to it in perfect tranquility.

One night he had a particularly fitful bout of sleep where he dreamt that he had approached the surface on hands and knees to garner a look at his reflection and the top half of his head had popped open and all kinds of thoughts and people had spilled out, came tumbling out into the abyss and were lost forever.

Once he’d tried to walk the length and breadth of the landscape that surrounded the abyss. He set out one morning and, since there were no discernible landmarks, just the flat light grey plane with geometric lines spaced evenly like a grid and a lazy off-white horizon and sky that never varied in tone, was never marred by inclement weather or sullied by the waxing and waning of dusk nor dawn, upon which the sun neither rose nor set. He’d set out and walked at first excitedly, later comfortably, then tiredly, and finally dejectedly, before turning and heading back to the hut.

Although he can’t recall signing up for a subscription, each day a fresh newspaper (so fresh the black ink stains his fingers and runs from the page) can be found on his doorstep always placed so as to obscure the H-O on his welcome mat.

Each morning he takes in the news along with a black cup of coffee that he first makes in a French press on his stove top. He loved to slowly press down the plunger and watch as the sediment of the grains is pressed down firmly to the bottom. Leaving only a perfect black cylinder of coffee.

His days were marked by the “arrival” of the newspaper and the sudden appearance of nightfall. As though someone had turned off the lights. The weather, if March had 31 days or not, whether it was a leap year or a holiday – meant nothing here. Nor did the seasons hold sway. It was always 20° C (70° F); day or night. He knew this because there was a thermometer outside his shed that said so. Its opinion never wavered.

It didn’t take him long to read the newspaper as it was no more than a few pages thick and consists mostly of headlines:

“EARTH-SIZED ASTEROID DISAPPEARS INTO THE EYE OF JUPITER”

“SCIENTISTS DISCOVER THAT THE SMELL OF FRESHLY CUT GRASS IS ACTUALLY GRASS SCREAMING”

“CHICKPEAS COULD BE GIVING YOU CANCER”

“CHICKPEAS FOUND TO CURE CANCER”

In the end, he was never really sure what to think after reading these kinds of things and he usually pitched the copy into the abyss where it didn’t so much sink as cease to exist on an atomic level.

Is “abyss” the best word for it? Would “void” with its negative connotations be better? Is it in fact a black hole with no gravitational pull?

Is it, in fact, a wormhole?!

No. This isn’t Star Trek.

He once wondered, day in and day out. He once wondered a great deal. He would sit in front of his house, biting his lip and searching his mind for answers. Answers to all of the questions (oh so many questions) he had in his head.

He wondered how it was that the dusky, blurred out sun splotch was always fixed one-quarter of the way up the horizon and how it was that it managed to disappear and be replaced by a moon of the exact same diameter but without having risen or fallen? How was it that the temperature never varied, and the wind never stirred?

Occasionally, something would swim up out of the darkness. A few stray memories of his mother’s face or his father’s hairy arms; or someplace he’d been like an old neighbor’s house or a school building. But strangely enough, with each passing remembrance, he felt less and less emotional about these memories (if that’s truly what they were). With each passing day that he thought about them the memories faded, like photos that had been handled too much and were now worn away.

These things used to keep him up at night, but now he turned in without a single thought in his head. The inside of his head was as blank and free of topographical irregularities as the (un)landscape around him. And every night he fell into a sleep as deep and dark as the abyss itself.

But he did still have pangs of recall. He might be watering the flowers around the edge of the house (that neither needed water nor ever bloomed or died but were always at the apex of their beauty) when he would suddenly hear an explosion of thunder, so loud it felt like it had cracked the sky. He looked up only to see the same sky. The same sun.

He once thought he’d seen several apparitions out on the horizon moving towards him like in an old western. They looked familiar to him and seemed to be shimmering in a wave of heat. He’d gotten up from where he was sitting and ran towards them waving and shouting. But then he’d remembered that there was no heat rising from the ground and that he was alone and so he’d stopped running and waving and then the apparitions had faded (as apparitions are wont to do) struck down by the tyranny of reason.

Once when out for a walk that lead exactly nowhere, he was seized with a memory of his first make-out session with a girl who’d smelled of spearmint gum and cigarettes. He had squatted down on the ground and quietly wept for this girl (the constellation of freckles on her face, her smile so innocent, full, and genuine – the type of smile one can never give as an adult). He wept for Kristen (yes that was her name) a girl he hadn’t kissed in 25 years.

Still, he kept up pretences. He watered his immortal flowers. He swept out the spotless floor of his place. He bagged up the trash and tossed it into the abyss. His chores done for the day he would sit back and take in his surroundings, drinking one of the colas or eating one of the ice creams that magically filled up in his refrigerator at night – never gaining a single kilo.

One day he returned to his shed from one of his futile strolls, to find his childhood television set – a large wooden box with a large TV encased within – and the circular rug (in a particularly 70s beige) he used to sit cross-legged on. On the screen was a fawn, freeze-framed. She had just lifted her ear at the sound of him and was looking over her shoulder back at him. He studied the brown of her coat, the irregular blotches of white on her like daubs from a paint brush. The look on her face frozen in that moment between carefree and astonishment. After a while he grew bored of it and, in a reflex that had lived in his body for years, reached up to flip the dial.

It was the same image. Well almost the same there was some distortion to the grass at her feet, it was sort of skewed or blurred sideways with a band of whitish grey across the middle we called that “snow”, he suddenly remembered.

He flipped the dial again and again.

Each time it was the same image, but a little more chaos was introduced until the picture was distorted beyond recognition and then a darkness settled on it, first in splotches like decay, until the entire screen was gradually filled with black. If he tried to go back it would reverse the damage, but the pictures were static, and the darkness loomed there in the future.

In a moment of frustration, he spun the dial all the way around in two complete circles clicking through the annihilation of the fawn, until the screen was solid black.

Out of an exhaustive curiosity, he flipped the dial forward one click, and found himself staring back at himself.

His hand was still on the dial. He knew this picture. A polaroid from the early ‘80s. He’d taken it himself as a little kid. The bright flash had whitened out the photo, but it was a self-portrait he’d taken with a timer of him and his old dog – a white-haired terrier named Jesse – who was here forever immortalized trying to lick him. His hand hadn’t moved from the dial. He left it there scrutinizing the portrait. He clicked forward a few channels and saw his face shift. A few more and he saw it – two maybe four years – the early awkwardness of adolescence already etched on his face, like a transparent mask over his younger self.

No. He wouldn’t play this game. He quickly got to his feet. He ripped the cord from the wall, and squatting down, lifted the television set. He hadn’t realized just how heavy it was. It weighed a ton and he struggled to get it out the door. The TV blocked most of his view and he had to strain to see where he was going. The muscles in his arms were screaming for mercy and sweat was running down his forehead and into his eyes but anger saw him through and as he reached the edge of the abyss he sped up his pace, hoping to vault it in, he tripped over the cord and fell headlong into the abyss (the lack of anything and nothing at all).

The only thing that remained of him was a black canvas slipper that was right on the edge like an eight ball near a pocket.

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Judson Hamilton lives in Wrocław, Poland. His most recent work includes a book of short stories Gross in Feather, Loud in Voice and a book of poems The New Make-Believe both with Dostoevsky Wannabe. Twitter: @judson_hamilton