A Matter of Life and Death or Something by Ben Stephenson

street knew anything well then I’d have to figure out a bigger investigation, or if I absolutely had to I might get a grown-up to do something, but only if I tried everything and it was still impossible.
    I opened my closet door and dragged out this cork bulletin board I had but had never used yet. Then I took some scrap sheets of paper and tore them very carefully into a couple different-sized pieces. I wrote a fact on each piece, and a title for the list on the biggest one. It wasn’t really helpful, but it was just a start:
    CLUES:
    â€“It was in the woods.
    â€“It must have been there a while.
    â€“Because of the mud and water and rust.
    â€“From the bent tree you take five steps away from the river and one sideways towards the house.
    â€“Someone named Phil.
    And I would keep adding more and more pieces every time I found a clue, and keep the clues organized in alphabetical order, or in order of hardest to discover to easiest, or in order of how true I thought they were, or a better system I would figure out later, and I would think hard about all the clues and rearrange them and come up with theories and illustrations and explanations et cetera and eventually get to the bottom of it.
    And my investigation would start that very afternoon, right after algebra.
    SO THEN LATER I was sitting in the woods on that mossy sea turtle rock, right before I went to check out the first house. I was thinking about Phil’s UNIVERSE. It was the middle of a grey Thursday afternoon, and I was sitting there thinking about it and adding my own parts in my head:
    (Only, a few of the humans weren’t sure exactly which penis had been placed into exactly which vagina, and exactly which vagina they crawled out of. The universe, or whatever, had tossed them to somebody else, just to mix things up. The universe loved to mix things up.)
    I kept drawing all the nothing in my sketchbook by pencilling the whole page black, and then I flipped my pencil around to the eraser side and erased the everything into it. I erased one tiny little explosion for the big bang, then the suns, the stars, the planets, including Saturn which is my favourite, Earth, the UFOs, the faraway galaxies, the penises and the vaginas, and everything else.
    It didn’t make sense though.
    I mean, how can a universe of nothing just turn into everything all the sudden? And if there is everything now, how could there have ever been nothing? This was a thing that I thought about quite often, to be honest with you, and sometimes I talked to people about it, like Finch, and smarter people, and it seemed like no one really knew what to say about it. Obviously no one knew what to say. But I mean I never even heard anyone with any really good ideas about it. No one even cared.
    So I drew it in my sketchbook like I said, and I tried to imagine it that way, but no matter how I imagined it, I couldn’t imagine it. Between the nothing and the everything must be something else. Like, what was around before the big bang? There had to be something, or else how could the big bang have even happened? If there was nothing, that meant there was no sketchbook first of all, and no eraser, and no me. If there was no eraser and no page and no me, then how did the erasing happen?
    If all that existed was a big, like, void or something, like a big black page, then that means there’s nothing different outside the page that could turn into the everything. Because everything is nothing. But if there was a something extra separate from the void, a little atom or something, it was still just as confusing because you can’t ask where it came from, or else you’re just asking the same question all over again.
    So: there was either nothing and then suddenly everything—which just doesn’t make sense—or there was nothing, plus another something that must have just been around forever, before the everything, before the nothing, and it was just always