Once upon a nowhere...

 A man lived alone beneath a mountain on a little island. All around him was the ocean. The man didn’t know there was anywhere beyond it. For him, the world was a little island with a mountain, ringed by the water. Perhaps the seas ended somewhere and fell into the sky. That was his world, and he was happy. There were times however when he felt a strange unwillingness to move, or hunt or do any of things that made up his daily routine. At night, he would watch the stars for hours, telling himself stories that he had made up about them. But they were the same stories and on some nights he would get tired of them. On those nights, he would pick up rocks and smash them against trees till his muscles ached and his fingers blistered. He got quite good at throwing rocks. But on the whole, perhaps he was happy in his little world.

Then one day a boat came to his island. The man had never seen a boat before, or another man, so he was astonished.

“Do you live in the lands under the sea or did you come from the sky?” he asked the stranger.

“I come from the lands beyond the sea,” the latter replied, “My ship sank, but I managed to get away on one of the boats. Are you the only person here? Were you a castaway too?”

But the man looked at the stranger with horror, and turned away. His head was exploding with ideas it couldn’t hold. Lands beyond the sea? That couldn’t be true.

A part of him was fascinated, even hungry at the possibility of new stories. Did his land have stars? What were the stories they told about them? But listening to him meant that there were more stories and more stars and more lands than what he knew. It meant he wasn't the centre of the world anymore. And he was afraid. Very very afraid.

“But perhaps he is lying,” the voice of the mountain god whispered to him, “He’s a demon, enemy of your gods, who wants to take your world from you.”

And so at night as the stranger slept on the beach the man crept up and smashed his head with a rock.

“He is gone,” the islander thought. “Now my world is safe again.”

But somehow it was not. He had known the heady feeling of hate. It had given him purpose and had filled up an empty space inside that he didn’t know was there. He still watched the stars, but they were dull pricks of light, holding no mysteries. He threw more rocks at trees. The sound they made against the bark as the wood splintered wasn’t as satisfying as hitting that other man’s skull.

He wanted something but he didn’t know what.

And then one night, being unable to take the gaping hole and emptiness inside, he picked a rock and smashed it against his own head.

The sound that it made as his skull crunched was very satisfying.