Something was composed of dirt and rocks, elephants and trees, and giant flaming masses ringed by dirt- and elephant-speckled planetoids, but not solely, for there were too many brands of beast to be named in a history so determinedly brief. Something was represented by every conceivable entity and object, and, when perceived as a whole, was often referred to in the collective term: Everything.

Most notable amongst gathered everything were three tremendous fellows (bigger than elephants but smaller than the planetoids they bespeckled) who encountered one another on a planetoid the Thursday after Everything had poofed into startled reality.

Zed was staring at the evening sky, watching fascinated as stars and planets pushed their faint silhouettes against a background of fading blue. After all, it was the first time he had seen the phenomenon he would label nightfall. Biv, stooped and chasing a pheasant as it scrambled through high grass, was oblivious to all else. Fidge, watching quietly, laughed aloud when Biv plowed into Zed, sending both rolling. The pheasant escaped.

"Hello," said Biv, brushing away loose grit. "My name is Biv."

"Hello Biv. My name is Zed," said Zed in return. He rubbed grass from his hair rather irritably and pushed the dark matting back into place. Biv's hair, he noted, was an untended tangle. "I Zed, think you Biv, are a boob."

Biv had no idea what a boob might be, but the word sounded bumblesome and insulting. His eyes narrowed. It appeared Zed was blaming him for the collision.

"It's your fault for being between me and the pheasant," Biv pointed out.

"The what?" asked Zed.

Naturally, since everything was fairly new, not much had a proper name.

"That bird thing?" asked Fidge, pushing out of the shrubbery.

"Who are you?" Zed wondered, startled by the appearance of yet another beast like himself.

"Yes," Biv answered, delighted for the same reason. "Yes. A bird. I like that word. I like birds."

"Me too," said Fidge. He sat in the grass with them, beaming at Biv and then Zed, who scowled.

"Who are you?" Zed repeated, louder and more deliberately. "And what are you doing here?"

"Fidge," answered the smallest of the three. "I like this place. Don't you think it should have a name?"

"No," said Zed.

"Yes," Biv replied. "North Peterman Avenue."

"Ugh!" Zed exclaimed.

"I like it," Fidge replied, grinning.

"Have you seen anything else here? Running about?" asked Biv. His hand spun in an all-encompassing cyclone. "Besides pheasants and Zed?"

"I was looking at something new when you ran into me,"muttered Zed. "When the sky goes black and everything becomes invisible but speckles of brightness overhead. I call it night."

"Night," Fidge repeated, fascinated. "What have you seen Biv?"

Biv brightened, obviously excited by the memory of his encounters with the new world. As a group they had seen the swirl and blob of galaxies, the carving of lakes and rivers, and the songs of birds and other animals. But it was difficult to tell these tales since very little, with the exception to these three, had a name. So most things were referred to as That or the collective Those.

"That and That and Those dug into, ah, It," Biv explained passionately, eyes watering and voice aquiver. Biv had a very earthy voice, rich and gravelly and tired. "Very deep, very long. They were all very long and deep to be sure, running from The Thing, which was even deeper, like... like...," Biv's lumpy, calloused hands chopped at the air as he sought the proper term, which, of course, did not exist, "...some other Thing. And still It digs, through This, That and the other, forever and ever."

He finished to the sound of awed, heavy silence and mesmerized stares. Even Zed, who seemed a determined pessimist, found himself enthralled as the tale unraveled.

Rapt as Zed and Fidge were, gaping and alert, they had no idea what Biv was talking about, since vagaries and pronouns made for indecipherable metaphors and incomprehensible stories. Still, it was agreed the stories Everything created in its everyday rigmarole was the best feature of Everything, though the term Everything was much too ambiguous to make a proper tale.

Consequently, they decided to initiate a campaign to provide every something with a name so all might be recalled more easily in the delightful romp of words they called stories. And so they went about naming and collecting the lore of the universe, gathering regularly on North Peterman Avenue, where most creatures were concentrated, to tell them.

As the universe blossomed around North Peterman Avenue, the lexicon of everything branched into a matting of titles and enjoyable tales in which the creatures and objects collecting in Everything slowly came to understand themselves. Most notable among them were the tales of Rabbit and the Treetop Nest and Penguin Dreams of Clouds, full of laughter and frustration and self-realization. But these tales are much too long and amusing to tell in this tragic, abbreviated historical account. This history, itself a brief tale, concerns itself largely with the trio of namers.

Zed, a tall fellow, brows ever slanted with intense concentration, named stars and planets, and occasionally animals, recounting tales of cosmic conception with legendary flair. He preferred to tell stories, believing he could better understand and explain things, and grew impatient when listening to others. Thoughts came to him so noisily that his mind rang with them until shared with Biv and Fidge.

Biv was large and usually quiet, dirty with pursuing the stuff digging through the ground that he named, including tiny-eyed moles, eyeless worms, and potatoes. His stories dealt mostly with the interactions between the creatures he discovered with the feel of folk tales and fables.

One day (as Zed had decided to call light-time), Zed was pondering over a possible better name he might give dogs, deciding if he knew their source a name might spring forward, when it occurred to him he had no idea where dogs came from. A point he brought to the attention of both Fidge and Biv.

"Other dogs," Fidge answered plainly. Fidge was tiny in all his features, compared to his gigantic brethren, with exception to his eyes, which gaped curiously at all he saw. Fidge named very little, handing out occasional titles to ambiguous notions, including fun and giddiness, instead roaming about what had already been named and appreciating the peace presently accorded to everything.

This answer made sense to Biv, who nodded in agreement and turned to leave, as there were still quite a few unlabeled Things tooling through the planet. Zed, dissatisfied, grunted.

"Then where did Everything come from in the first place?" he asked. "Unlike dogs, Everything had only Nothing to spring from." Certainly, this was the source of all things, such as dogs, including Zed, Biv and Fidge as well. It was a story from which all other stories grew, and therefore an epic Zed was eager to know. So they sat amidst the grass and rocks and bugs and here-and-there an elephant, and pondered in the cool pleasant winds Biv called the breeze.

After a bit, Zed decided he had the answer and presented it to his fellow namers.

Taking a deep breath he spoke in a low, dramatic voice.

"Before everything there was nothing," Zed explained, "and nothing bunched together into a very small, dense wad the size of a coconut and exploded, creating the something that grew into everything."

Fidge misunderstood, pointing out if there was only nothing there couldn't be coconuts.

Biv may have agreed were he not just emerging from his own thoughts, deciding at length that someone had made something, though Zed was quick to indicate someone had only nothing to make themselves from.

In light of their arguments, the absent-minded babble of Fidge seemed the only certainty, since in either case the only thing nothing was capable of composing, no matter how much there was of the stuff, was nothing. Yet Zed and Biv were stubborn, and desperate to give nothing, the very thing from which they had originated, substance and purpose.

melon mirage's home page | wild violet's home page