The Shovel System

Jackie lays in the cozy w.o.m.b of the earth, resting his head on his hands with his eyes closed.

Jackie's mind is drifting in and out of consciousness and dreams. Eyes open or closed he sees nothing. The old man hears the steady thumping of his mighty, infected heart in his ears, the rushing of blood throughout his body and the steady rise and fall of his broad, sturdy c.h.e.s.t as he inhales and exhales.

Jackie finds himself driving his old pick-up down his home lane to go to the hardware store, but parks on an empty plot of land and leaps into a hole. Vertigo makes him stir and wake up.

He thinks about his strange dream for a few minutes before turning his bored mind to something else. His grandson once asked him what was beyond the universe, and he had guessed that there was nothing.

His grandson had cupped his chin and nodded, telling him that sounds right. Nothing becomes Something, and Something becomes Nothing. There is always something and never nothing because as long as something exists, there is not nothing.

The lad had told the old man to imagine he could hold the entire universe as it existed in the past, exists now, and will exist in the future in his hand, all simultaneously. He said that he and his friends suspect that the universe is a lot like a movie on a DVD, the entire film exists, yet we see only a part of it.

The young man then said, step further away from that existence, there could be anything, such as an infinite multiverse, parallel universes, our universe could repeat for eternity.

The grandson then went on to say that he believes that constantly asking, where did it come from and to seek the outermost shell of existence is the way to the truth. What's beyond the universe? What's beyond that? What's beyond even that? What's beyond all things?

He then said to take it to the extreme, and the route always arrives at nothingness. Not the same thing, he said, as emptiness, as the empty volume is comprised of space, which is made of energy, thus a thing.

Yet, he said, as long as something exists, there is never nothingness, you could search infinitely in all realities and times and never find it, yet nothingness has no time, thus in the instant that everything returns to nothing, something is born from nothingness yet again.

Repeating universes, parallel realities, every moment happens because the universe vanishes into nothingness for an instant and then returns. Not one thing existing stops the instant unraveling of reality into nothing at the very next moment, sometime in the past, or right now.

He then chuckled and said, it's frightening to imagine that the possibility of infinite universes popping into and out of existence from one moment to the next before our universe comes back into reality. He added that he believed this might be part of the reason why energy exists in moments and not continuous motion.

Jackie opens his eyes and sighs; his grandson sure got all the family smarts. Haha, he smirks, this old grandpa got to meet real-life aliens before anyone else by coming here to this exotic world. Bet that boy would be green with envy if he could send photos back home.

Jacke turns over onto his side, that lad wouldn't even recognize him now. He frowns in the dark and rolls around a few times to get comfortable again.

---

The darkness swims around his vision, taking on all sorts of strange and frightening shapes. Jackie blinks his eyes and sits up. He's surrounded by black grass as far as he can see.

"Where am I?" mutters Jackie as he peers around. He sees a phone pole standing not too far away, and the phone is ringing.

He walks over and picks it up and places the hard enamel rotary phone to his ear only to be greeted by line disconnect beeping.

Beep beep beep. Jackie hangs up the phone and sees his truck embedded half into the ground, tail end in the air.

Jackie peers into the darkness and can only see the distorted shapes swimming in his vision. "It's too dark here. My mind is playing tricks on me. Oh, what's that?"

He spots crooked street lamps and rushes over to stand under their dim light, casting his body in greys.

He stands on a long-abandoned road that has been taken over by the black grass. The way is jagged and crooked, looking like an earthquake had passed through before. "I wonder where this leads?" He mutters in the night.

The old man walks along the road for several hours, then several more hours, passing through the feeble light of the crooked lamps one by one.

Jackie hears whispering voices and looks around. He has come to be walking among a crowd of indescribable travelers that fill the air with faint murmurs that worm their way into his mind.

The old man and the crowd arrive at the end of the road. A grand and magnificent train station awaits them. Dark splotches mar its majesty here and there. Jackie spies dried, cobwebbed skeletons sitting, laying and praying as he walks through the grand train station.

'when did I wear a vest?' he thinks.

He reaches into his vest pocket and pulls out a white ticket, marked as sold with a shovel as the company symbol. He hands the ticket to the conductor to stamp and then receives it again — the murmuring of the crowd crescendos abruptly.

Jackie ignores it and steps aboard the train carriage to find his seat marked S8. He sees that there are eight seats in the carriage, all occupied by forms that he forgets the moment he looks away from them, all except the empty eighth seat.

His seat is the last one, so he makes his way to it and sits down.

Jackie Lewin places his hand on his shovel and strokes his beard, turning to gaze out the window. The indescribable crowds outside mix and shift; all of them forgotten the moment he moves his eyes away.

Silence fills the train carriage as the train departs from the station. It picks up speed and travels faster and faster. The gloomy lands flash by outside the window while Jackie looks on.

A pale face appears in the window and Jackie jerks to attention, catching his breath as his heart pounds. The face has black holes for its eyes and mouth, long slender fingers that it uses to grasp and shake the window.

He hears scratching and thumping all over the carriage and glances around, seeing all of the windows filled with the terrifying faces, all of them trying to get into the carriage.

The train door rattles and shakes, dents and deforms as something heavy keeps attacking it. Jackie feels tension growing in his throat while his knuckles turn white from gripping his shovel for dear life.