Billy Cooper sat on the porch and drank beer and watched the driveway.

The driveway was twelve feet wide and paved with asphalt that had been laid in 1978 and cracked in three places and overgrown with grass in the cracks. Billy had lived on this driveway for twenty-six years. He knew every crack. He knew which ones were new and which ones were old. He knew that when it rained, water collected in the biggest crack and stayed there for two or three days before soaking in.

He knew all this because he watched the driveway. It was what he did.

The beer was in a can. He held it in his right hand. The can was cold and sweating and the condensation ran down his fingers and onto his jeans and made a dark spot on his thigh that he didn't notice or didn't care about.

Across the street, Mrs. Gable was watering her flowers. She was a small woman with gray hair and a wide-brimmed hat and a watering can that she carried with both hands because it was full and heavy. She watered the flowers in her front yard methodically, one by one, rose by rose, petunia by petunia, and she did it every morning at ten o'clock, rain or shine.

She looked up from her flowers and looked at Billy. She looked at the beer can in his hand. She looked back at her flowers. She turned the watering can toward the roses and the water came out in a thin gray stream and fell on the petals and made them darker.

Billy drank from the can. The beer was warm now. He didn't mind. Warm beer was still beer.

The house behind him was his father's house. His father had died six months ago, of a heart attack in his sleep, which was the kind of death Billy's mother had wanted for him and the kind his father had earned. The house was paid off. The lot was half an acre. There was an oak tree in the back and a shed that leaked when it rained and a garage that contained a lawnmower that hadn't been started in three years.

Billy had moved back into the house the week after the funeral. He had packed two suitcases from the apartment he had been renting—the apartment his mother had paid the deposit on, the apartment he had lived in for two years and had never really left, because he had kept coming back, to this house, to this porch, to this driveway, because coming back was easier than going forward.

His sister Sarah came on Sundays. She always came on Sundays. She came at four o'clock, which was her dinner time, but she always came at four o'clock on Sundays, and she brought groceries—cereal and milk and eggs and bread and sometimes a frozen dinner that she would put in the freezer and Billy would not eat for three days and then eat anyway because it was there and it was food and eating was something you did when food was there.

"Hey," she would say, letting herself in with the key she had. "How are you?"

"Fine," Billy would say.

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

She would put the groceries away. She would look around the kitchen, which was clean in the way that a kitchen is clean when nobody cooks in it—no dishes in the sink, no food on the counter, no crumbs on the table, because there is nothing to create crumbs when you eat frozen dinners in front of the television.

"Billy," she would say, "you need to do something."

"I'm doing something."

"What are you doing?"

" Sitting."

She would sigh. It was the same sigh she had been using since they were children. When he had broken the vase and she had told him to clean it up and he had sat on the floor and watched the dust instead. When he had failed math in tenth grade and she had told him to study and he had played video games instead. When he had dropped out of community college and she had told him to finish and he had moved back home instead.

The sigh was old. It was as familiar as the porch and the driveway and the cracks in the asphalt.

"What am I supposed to do?" he would ask.

"Anything," she would say. "Anything. Get a job. Any job. Wash dishes. Stock shelves. Drive a truck. Something."

"I'll think about it."

"You said that last time."

"I'll think about it this time too."

She would leave at six. She always left at six. She had a life in Columbus, thirty miles away, where she worked at a hospital as a medical assistant, where she lived in an apartment with a man named Ray, where her life was small and steady and full of the kind of ordinary responsibilities that Billy had never learned how to carry.

After she left, Billy would sit back on the porch and drink beer and watch the driveway.

The truck was the first thing to go.

His father had owned a Ford pickup, a 1985 model in blue, with 180,000 miles on it and a dent in the passenger door from when Billy had backed into the oak tree in 2019. The truck ran. It was loud and it shook when you accelerated and the heater only worked on one setting, which was hot, but it ran.

Billy didn't need the truck. He didn't go anywhere. The nearest grocery store was four miles away. He walked there sometimes, when he felt like it, carrying a paper bag, buying bread and cheese and beer. Four miles there, four miles back. Eight miles in a day that consisted mostly of sitting on the porch.

But the truck was an asset, and assets can be converted to cash, and Billy had learned this from a man named Denny who came to the house one afternoon in late spring and sat on the porch and talked to Billy about the truck the way a doctor talks about a diagnosis—gently, but with the certainty of someone who knows the outcome.

"It's worth two thousand," Denny said. "Maybe twenty-five hundred if I find the right buyer. You sell it to me, I give you cash. You sell it to a dealer, they'll give you fifteen hundred. I'm being fair."

Billy looked at the truck. He looked at Denny. He looked at the driveway.

"Two thousand," he said.

"Cash," Denny said. "Right now."

Billy thought about the two thousand dollars. He thought about what he would do with two thousand dollars. He didn't have a clear picture. He knew he didn't want to put it in a bank. He knew he didn't want to save it. He knew that if he had two thousand dollars in his hand, he would spend it, and that would be the end of it.

"Okay," he said.

Denny smiled. It was not a nice smile. It was the smile of a man who had just made a decision for someone else.

The truck was gone by Thursday. Denny came with a tow truck and hooked up the Ford and pulled it out of the driveway and drove it away, and Billy watched from the porch, drinking beer, and he felt nothing. Not sadness. Not relief. Nothing. Just the absence of a truck where a truck had been.

Then the television went. It was a flat-screen, forty-two inches, a gift from Sarah for his father's sixty-fifth birthday. It was in the living room, facing the porch, and Billy had watched football on it and news and baseball and nothing in particular, scrolling through channels at two in the morning when he couldn't sleep.

Denny came back in June. He sat on the porch. He talked about the television.

"Three hundred," he said. "For the TV. It's in good condition."

Billy looked at the television through the screen door. He had watched a lot of television on that screen. He thought about that. He thought about the three hundred dollars.

"Okay," he said.

Then the furniture went. Not all of it—Billy kept the recliner, the one his father had owned and then Billy had owned, the one that was torn on the left armrest and smelled of old smoke and fabric softener and the particular combination of odors that a house acquires when nobody changes anything in it for twenty years.

But the dining table went. The bookshelf went. The lamps went. The rug went. Denny took it all, and he paid in cash, small bills in an envelope, and Billy counted the money on the kitchen table and it was less than he had expected and more than he had thought he would get, and he put it in a drawer and forgot about it and found it three weeks later and spent it on beer and gas station food and a movie he didn't remember.

The bank came in July.

They sent a letter first. Then another letter. Then a man in a suit who stood on the porch and talked to Billy about the mortgage and the foreclosure process and the options available to him.

Billy sat in the recliner. The man in the suit stood on the porch. The sun was hot and the man's suit was dark and Billy could see sweat on the man's forehead, just above the edge of his glasses, and Billy thought about how hot it was and how he was sitting in a recliner and the man was standing in the sun and who was winning this particular exchange.

"You can sell the house," the man said. "Get out from under the mortgage. Avoid foreclosure on your record."

"I don't want to sell the house."

"You don't have a choice. You're behind on payments. Three months now."

"I'll pay next month."

"You can't. I looked at your account. You haven't made a payment in eight months."

Billy looked at him. He looked at the sweat on his forehead. He looked at the driveway, where the cracks had grown wider and the grass had grown taller.

"Okay," he said.

The bank took the house in August. They sent a crew to change the locks. Billy was sitting on the porch when they came. He watched them pick the lock on the front door. He watched them walk inside. He watched them come back out and hand him a piece of paper that said the house was no longer his.

He took the paper. He looked at it. He folded it and put it in his pocket.

The man who represented the bank—a woman with short hair and a clipboard and a voice that was neither kind nor unkind, just professional—looked at him and said, "Is there anything else you need?"

Billy thought about it. He thought about the recliner, which he was still sitting in. He thought about the beer in his hand, which was warm now. He thought about the driveway and the cracks and the grass.

"No," he said.

They left. The house was empty. The porch was empty. The driveway was empty. Billy sat on the porch for a while longer, and then he stood up, and he walked inside, and he picked up the recliner—he couldn't lift it, really, it was too heavy, so he dragged it, inch by inch, across the living room floor, leaving a scratch in the hardwood that would be there when the new owners came—and he carried it to the truck he had rented for this purpose, which was parked in the driveway, which was the first vehicle to be in the driveway in three months.

He loaded the recliner. He drove it to a storage unit he had rented in another town, five miles away. He parked it in the unit. He locked the door. He drove back.

He didn't have another truck. He walked.

He walked to another town. He walked to an apartment that was smaller than the porch, in a building that smelled of cigarette smoke and boiled cabbage and had a laundry room in the basement that contained three washing machines, one of which was always broken.

The apartment had one room and a kitchen and a bathroom that was so small you could reach both walls at once. There was a window that looked out onto a brick wall. The brick wall was red and covered in moss and had a fire escape that rattled when the wind blew.

Billy sat on the floor of the apartment. He had no furniture. He sat on the floor. He bought a beer from a corner store. He drank it. He sat on the floor and he watched the brick wall through the window.

He did this every day. He bought beer. He drank it. He sat on the floor. He watched the brick wall. He thought about the porch and the driveway and the cracks in the asphalt and how he had watched them for twenty-six years and how he had watched them change and how he had never changed.

He was twenty-six years old. He had no job. No education. No skills. No relationships worth mentioning. No debts, because he had spent everything and the house was gone and the truck was gone and the television was gone and the furniture was gone and there was nothing left to owe and nothing left to take.

He was sitting on the floor of a one-room apartment in a town that was not his, in a state that was not his home, in a country that was not his, watching a brick wall through a window, and he felt nothing.

Not sadness. Not anger. Not regret. Nothing.

The brick wall was red and covered in moss. The moss was green. The green and the red and the gray of the fire escape and the yellow of the light from the street outside made a picture that was the same every day, because the wall didn't change and the moss didn't change and the fire escape didn't change and the light changed only with the time of day and the time of day was predictable and the predictability was the point.

Billy sat on the floor. He drank beer. He watched the wall.

He was twenty-six years old. He had become exactly what his father had feared: a man who sat and watched and did nothing and let everything happen to him and never happened to anything.

He was stone. Not because a god had turned him to stone. Not because a swamp had swallowed him. Not because a jury had sentenced him to prison.

He was stone because he had chosen, every single day, to do nothing, and doing nothing, done long enough, becomes a kind of stillness, and stillness, held long enough, becomes stone.

He was sitting on the floor of a one-room apartment, and he was twenty-six years old, and he had never been more alive than he was in that moment of absolute and total nothing, because nothing requires no effort, and nothing cannot fail, and nothing cannot be taken away.

He was nothing. And nothing was all he had left.

OTMES Objective Codes: - M1_Tragedy: 7.0 - M2_Comedy: 0.3 - M3_Satire: 4.0 - M4_Poetry: 4.0 - M5_Strategy: 0.5 - M6_Suspense: 0.5 - M7_Horror: 2.0 - M8_Science_Fiction: 0.0 - M9_Romance: 0.3 - M10_Epic: 1.0 - N1_Aggressive: 0.05 - N2_Passive: 0.95 - K1_Individual: 0.45 - K2_Collective: 0.55 - Tragedy_Index: 62.1 - Direction_Angle_Theta: 180 degrees - Style_Classification: Zero-Degree Realism - Narrative_Type: Dirty Realism - Core_Vector: (M1_Tragedy, N2_Passive, K2_Collective)