NOTE: This story was strongly influenced by the song Arpeggi – Kelly Lee Owens, so either listen to it during or after reading
The first package came on a foggy Tuesday morning. Greg found it on the usual stack table at the loading dock. It was a small, nondescript, and labeled with nothing but the word NOWHERE scribbled in shaky, black ink. He glanced around, expecting one of his co-workers to be waiting for his reaction. But the dock was empty, with the exception of the continuous hum of the industrial fans and the creak of loading bay doors swinging in the wind.
At first, he laughed. It must be some kind of joke, he thought. Some kind of prank from one of the guys on the night shift. But there it was on his delivery sheet: Address: NOWHERE. The sheet was blank where the coordinates usually went. Curious, Greg punched it into his GPS. To his surprise, the device froze for a second, flashed a couple of times, then showed a blank space on the map about ten km out of town.
With a shrug, Greg loaded the package into his van. “Guess we’re delivering to nowhere,” he muttered to himself.
The “address” was a patch of dusty ground by an abandoned field. Not a single house, mailbox, or even a road sign marked the spot. Feeling foolish, Greg turned the package over in his hands. For a brief moment, he considered just leaving it there and driving off. But as he set it on the ground, the strangest sensation came over him, like someone was watching him from afar.
Inexplicably unsettled, he backed away slowly, got in his van, and drove off without looking back.
The next morning, as Greg was filling up at the gas station and grabbing a few snacks for the road, he overheard two people talking in hushed voices.
“Did you hear about that new sinkhole on the old Miller farm?” one said. “Just swallowed up half the cornfield overnight. No warning, nothing.”
Greg’s stomach twisted. The old Miller farm was near the spot he’d left the mysterious package.
He dismissed it as coincidence, until another NOWHERE package appeared on his next shift. This one was larger, heavier, and oddly warm to the touch. The same instructions, the same blank coordinates.
This time, the drop-off location was a different blank spot on the map. When Greg reached the destination, he noticed a subtle difference: an unnatural silence hung over the area, as though sound itself had been swallowed up. The trees stood rigid, leaves unmoving in a stillness that was almost oppressive.
Unsettled, he placed the box down and quickly returned to his van. As he pulled away, he saw the box out of the corner of his eye. It was vibrating, almost pulsating against the ground like a living object. He sped off, his heart in his throat and feeling a great sense of paranoia.
Two days later, Greg watched a local news report in horror. An inexplicable wave of electrical outages had swept across town, the epicenter located just km’s from the second delivery site. Streetlights blinked off in sequence, car alarms going off all at once, people becoming enraged as it affected their work. These occurrences were rolling in patterns as if being manually controlled by something unseen.
It wasn’t long before another NOWHERE package appeared. The boxes began coming in like clockwork, each heavier and stranger than the last. Each time he delivered a package, the effects in the “real world” grew stranger, more unnerving. Streets cracked open; birds abandoned whole neighborhoods, pets disappeared.
On the night after his fifth delivery, a thick fog settled over the town; so thick one could barely see the outline of their hand in front of their eyes. Greg’s nerves were fraying. He tried asking his boss about the NOWHERE packages, but the response was always short, uninterested, and evasive. “Just make the deliveries, Greg. The client’s paying well, and they’re anonymous, so leave it be.”
As the weeks passed, Greg found himself staring at his GPS with dread. The blank spots on the map were spreading. Each new delivery location was closer to town. The mysterious sites grew more active, unnatural things happening in their radius. On his ninth delivery, the “drop spot” appeared just outside his own neighborhood. He found himself frozen and overcome with nerves, clutching the package tightly in his sweaty hands.
Finally, Greg couldn’t take it anymore. On his next day off, he returned to the first drop-off site, hoping to make sense of it. He found the spot easily enough, but what lay there made him step back in horror. Where he’d left the first package, there was now a yawning hole, almost as if something had burrowed up from underground. And within it, a strange, pulsing glow illuminated the dark soil.
Greg stumbled back, but his foot hit something solid—the second package, somehow fused into the earth, like it had grown roots. He could feel a deep hum, the vibration shaking his feet. Panic shot through him as he looked up, realizing that in every direction, from each delivery point, a spiderweb of cracks and fractures in the sky were spreading toward the town.
Desperate, Greg sped back to the distribution center, hoping to find answers. He rummaged through the stacks of paperwork, but there was no record of any NOWHERE packages. His GPS history was empty, the coordinates erased.
That night, the final package arrived. It was unlike the others: it was enormous, wrapped in dark, weathered burlap, and marked with strange symbols. The words NOWHERE had been carved in with what looked like an army knife.
Greg refused to deliver it. But as midnight approached, he began to feel an overwhelming pull, a compulsion to take the package to the designated blank spot on the map. His limbs felt as if they moved on their own. Finally, with no memory of how he got there, he found himself standing in the middle of town square, package in hand.
The streets were eerily empty. The sky was clouded over, and the street lights flickered just as before, but this time in what seemed like morse code. He placed the package in the center of the square, heart pounding, and took a step back.
The burlap unfurled itself. Inside was a black, mirror-like sphere that seemed to absorb the light around it, casting the town square in darkness. It started to spin, faster and faster, until it was nothing more than a blur.
And then, all at once, it stopped. Greg’s own face reflected back at him, but his expression was twisted and distorted, a version of himself he didn’t recognize.
Suddenly, he was aware of movement all around him. People had gathered, drawn from their homes in silence, staring at the strange, dark sphere that pulsed with life. The ground began to shake, and a low hum filled the air, intensifying with each beat of the sphere.
The world seemed to fold in on itself, twisting and warping as the town began to vanish piece by piece, as if it were being absorbed into that black, endless NOWHERE.
Greg screamed, but no sound came out. He looked down at his hands, only to watch them start to disappear, fragment by fragment.
In his final moments, he understood.
The NOWHERE deliveries had never been for a destination outside the map. They had been for his own town all along. Each delivery had chipped away at the fabric of reality, drawing “Nowhere” closer to “somewhere”, until they were one and the same.
And as Gregs hands became transparent, he knew he was fading into the void, and he realized that Nowhere was not a place.
It was a state of being.
