Janice awoke. All around her was a whiteness so piercing that she wondered if she had been blinded. She tried to move, to speak, to breathe, but she couldn’t. Was she paralyzed? Had she just died? No, how impossible. As she regained her sense of touch, it occurred to her that she was clad shoulders-down in a metal suit—like a chastity belt for the whole body. There was even a keyhole at her navel. Through the varying degrees of whiteness her eyes could make out the shapes of similar metal bodies. They were all lying near her, lifeless, covered in the whiteness. Her mouth gaped as she tried to fill her lungs with air; but something was blocking the way, a substance that stuffed her throat without sparing a millimeter of empty space. So she lay there, shaking violently within her metal suit, feeling herself turning blue. But suddenly, a colossal cough. Out puffed pounds and pounds of white powdery dust, swirling this way and that around her head. She turned on her side, in absolute agony, purging her lungs of everything that had settled there. The hacking and gasping and broken groans continued for approximately half an hour. It is a wonder she did not die from exhaustion. The dust drifted everywhere now—even in her apparent blindness, she could feel it settling and shifting on the skin of her face.

Now Janice could breathe and hear. Her bones creaked even more loudly than the metal suit as she staggered up from her lying place. A heavy fall, clunk, screech! A whimper. She steadied herself and tried once more to stand. This attempt worked, and she lifted what seemed like the weight of a thousand men on each foot, walking—walking out of whiteness and into more whiteness. One hell of a void.

Each step brought shrill sounds of metallic friction, and each metal boot agitated clouds of dust. Ten hours of walking, and Janice was on the brink of collapse. But she could now see something near her, a grey-black rectangular mass about twice her size, lying lengthwise in the whiteness. This was either imagination or proof that indeed she wasn’t blind. As she got closer to the object, she discovered a key lying on top of it. She picked up the key, wiping off the dust. She unlocked the full-body chastity belt and stepped out—free.

But how to explain a lone grey-black rectangular prism which sat in the white void? After staring silently for a few minutes, she mustered up the courage to touch it. Nothing catastrophic. Fibrous—coarse, blackish, absorbing the dust from her hands when she ran them along the sides of the prism. On the top there was old paper, with the faded word, “Maine” in a corner.

She could push the prism across the voidish floor with more ease than expected; it was light for its size. And wherever she pushed the prism, a blackish-green track was left behind. An eliminator of the dust! She pushed and pushed, leaning with both hands and giving her full body weight. Day after day Janice would clean up mile after mile of white dust with her quiet black-grey companion—the swiff-swiff-swiff had a certain reassuring rhythm. The grey object would soak up everything someday, leaving her the most beautiful gift: a clean slate.