The bus from Columbus dropped Tommy at the edge of Ironwood at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday in October, which was the kind of time and day that made a place feel even emptier than it already was. Tommy stood on the cracked sidewalk with a duffel bag and a paper bag from the bus station convenience store that contained a slightly stale peanut butter sandwich and a bottle of water, and he looked around and thought: this is exactly as I remember it.

Which was not a comforting thought.

Ironwood, Ohio had been a town that did nothing well and everything inadequately for as long as Tommy had been alive, which was thirty-five years. The steel mill had closed in 2008, which was before Tommy left for New York, but the closure had not been dramatic. There had been no protests or picket lines or news crews. The mill had simply stopped, one Tuesday, and the people who worked there had gone home and not come back, and the town had slowly realized that it no longer had a reason to exist.

Tommy had left for New York because he thought writing was something you did in New York. He had returned to Ironwood because he could no longer afford New York, which was something he did not tell anyone.

The first thing he noticed was the gas station. Dave still worked there. Dave, who had been his age in high school and was now forty years old and carrying a beer belly that would have made him unrecognizable if Tommy had not known him since they were twelve years old stealing apples from the tree behind the elementary school.

"Tommy," Dave said, coming out of the gas station when he saw the bus pull away. "You came back."

"I said I would."

"You always did show up when you said you would. That was your thing."

They stood on the sidewalk for a moment, not hugging, not doing anything that would require emotional vocabulary. This was how men from Ironwood did greetings.

"How's the writing going?" Dave asked.

"Fine."

"Fine?"

"Nobody buys what I write, but I get to write it, so."

"Same here," Dave said. "Nobody buys gas, but I get to pump it, so."

They laughed, and it was a good laugh, the kind of laugh that came from recognition rather than humor.

Tommy stayed at Dave's house, in the same house they had grown up in, which was smaller than Tommy remembered and smelled faintly of cigarettes and something else that Tommy did not want to identify. Dave's mother had died five years ago, and Dave's father had moved to Florida, which was where all the people from Ironwood went when they could no longer bear to stay.

The next day, Tommy met Linda. Linda was his from high school—no, not his, exactly. They had sat next to each other in chemistry class for a semester, and they had talked a few times after school, and Tommy had thought about asking her out and had never done it, and now here she was, working at the Walmart on the edge of town, married to a man named Gary who drank too much and worked at a place that Tommy could not remember the name of.

"Tommy Kowalski," Linda said, when he introduced himself. She was twenty-nine, which made her seem older than Tommy, though they were the same age. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she was wearing a Walmart vest over a t-shirt that said Team Walmart in letters that were peeling.

"Linda Murphy," Tommy said. "You look—"

"Old?"

"Tired."

"Same."

They sat in the parking lot of the Walmart and drank coffee from cups that had been sitting in the sun, and Linda told Tommy about her life, which was not a story so much as a series of events that had happened to her without her consent. Gary drank. Gary hit things. Gary had started hitting Linda three years ago, which was after they had had Fiona, which was two years before that. Fiona was eighteen, which meant that Linda had had her at sixteen, which meant that Linda had been the kind of girl from Ironwood who had gotten pregnant in the back seat of a pickup truck and married the boy who was supposed to be in biology class.

"Fiona's doing okay," Linda said. "She's going to community college. She wants to be a nurse. She's smarter than both of us combined."

"That's good," Tommy said.

"It's something."

The word something hung in the air between them, heavy and insufficient.

On the third day, the carnival came to town. It was the annual Ironwood Harvest Festival, which was the only thing the town had left that it could call its own. There were rides—a Ferris wheel that looked like it had been salvaged from a junkyard, a carousel with horses that were missing their paint—and food stands that sold fried dough and corn dogs and soda that cost exactly the same as it had thirty years ago, which was one of the few things in Ironwood that had not changed.

Tommy was going to give a speech at the carnival. This had been arranged by the mayor, a man named Richard Stone who had been the mayor of Ironwood for twenty-two years and who believed that giving Tommy the title of Distinguished Citizen was the same as giving him a medal, which it was not, because medals meant something and the title of Distinguished Citizen in Ironwood meant that you were the person who got to stand in front of the crowd and say something nice about the town while the crowd wondered when it would be over.

Tommy stood at the microphone in front of about eighteen people. Eighteen people, plus three children who were running around chasing each other, plus a dog that was lying in the sun. The Ferris wheel was turning slowly, making a sound like a dying animal.

Tommy looked at the crowd and thought about what he was going to say. He had prepared something, something that Dave had helped him write, something that was supposed to be heartfelt and funny and authentic. But looking at the eighteen people and the three children and the dog, Tommy realized that the prepared speech was not what he needed to say.

So he said something else.

"I grew up in this town," he said. "I left because I thought I had to. I came back because I couldn't afford to stay away. I'm a writer, which means I tell stories for a living, and the story I'm telling right now is that I don't know what any of this means."

The crowd was quiet. The dog lifted its head.

"I came back to accept this award," Tommy said, gesturing to the paper certificate that the mayor was holding, "but I don't think awards mean anything in a town like this. I don't think anything we do here means anything. Not the carnival, not the mayor, not the steel mill that closed and the Walmart that replaced it and the gas station where Dave has been pumping gas for fifteen years."

Dave, who was standing near the front, looked at the ground.

"I'm not saying this to be negative," Tommy said. "I'm saying this because it's true. We're a town that used to make steel and now we don't. We're a town that used to have a reason to exist and now we don't. And we're a town that gives awards to people who leave because it's easier to honor someone who's gone than to help someone who's here."

The eighteen people were silent. The children had stopped running. The dog had gone back to sleep.

"I'm a writer," Tommy said. "And the story I'm telling is that this is not a tragedy. It's not a comedy. It's not a hero's journey. It's just... this. This is what happens when a town dies slowly. And we're still here, and we're still doing the carnival, and we're still giving awards, and we're still pretending that it means something."

He paused. The Ferris wheel made its dying-animal sound.

"It doesn't mean anything," Tommy said. "But we're here. And that's the only story I have."

He stepped away from the microphone. The mayor, who was holding the paper certificate, looked at Tommy with an expression that Tommy could not read. It was not anger. It was not disappointment. It was something worse: confusion. The mayor had expected a different speech, a speech that would fit into the narrative of the carnival, the narrative of the town, the narrative of everything that had ever been said at this carnival in the twenty-two years that he had been mayor.

Tommy had not given him that speech.

After the carnival, Tommy walked around the grounds. He ate fried dough that was too sweet and soda that was too cold. He watched the children run around the Ferris wheel. He watched Dave stand by the gas stand, drinking a beer and watching Tommy with an expression that was also unreadable.

He watched Linda stand near the Walmart food stand, talking to a woman he did not recognize, and he saw Fiona sitting on the bumper of a pickup truck, reading a book, ignoring the carnival entirely.

Fiona looked up and saw Tommy looking at her. She did not smile, but she did nod, and it was a nod that said: I see you, and I know what you're doing, and I don't care.

That night, Tommy sat on the porch of Dave's house and drank a beer and watched the stars. Ironwood had no light pollution, which meant that the stars were visible in a way that they were not in New York, where the sky was always the color of a dirty dish.

"You were right," Dave said, sitting beside him. "About everything."

"Was I?"

"Yeah. This town is dying. And we're all just... waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

Dave was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "I don't know. That's the thing. I don't know what we're waiting for."

Tommy nodded. He understood. He had been waiting for something too, though he had not known what it was. He had come back to Ironwood looking for something—meaning, or purpose, or closure, or forgiveness, or something. But what he had found was nothing, and nothing was exactly what he had needed to find.

The next morning, Tommy caught the bus to Columbus. From Columbus, he caught a train to Chicago. From Chicago, he caught a bus to New York.

He went back to his apartment in Brooklyn, which was smaller than Dave's house and smelled faintly of mildew and the apartment above him that cooked Thai food every night. He opened his laptop and began to write.

He wrote about Ironwood. He wrote about Dave and the gas station. He wrote about Linda and the Walmart. He wrote about Fiona and the pickup truck. He wrote about the carnival and the paper certificate and the eighteen people and the dog.

He wrote it all, and he wrote it honestly, and he sent it to a magazine in New York that published short stories about ordinary people doing ordinary things.

The story was not accepted. Neither were the next three stories he sent. Or the next five. Or the next ten.

But he kept writing. Because that was what he did. He was a writer, which meant he told stories for a living, and the stories he told were about nothing, and the nothing was everything.

OTMES-v2 Code: [The Distinguished Nothing] M1=4.0 M2=4.5 M3=6.0 M4=2.5 M5=4.0 M6=5.0 M7=5.5 M8=6.0 M9=5.0 M10=4.0 N1=0.60 N2=0.40 K1=0.50 K2=0.50 I=0.30 R=0.60 theta=60 deg TI=45.0