"I have nothing left to do tonight, so I'll do that."
"Do what?"
"Nothing."
"You can't do nothing."
"Nonsense. See this new thing I'm doing now?" Long pause. "We'll call that 'nothing'."
"Nothing is new under the sun."
"I'm glad you're coming around."
"No. Witless labeling aside, you really think you're the first to call something 'nothing'? Thinking was called 'nothing' once. Sleeping was called 'nothing' once. In every case of something called 'nothing', someone realized that the so-called nothing-doer was really causing the world to change in a previously unnamed way. You can't say you're doing something new when you're really doing something old. Nothing can do nothing, see?"
"Perhaps I'm nothing, then."
"Nonsense. If you're nothing, then I'm a friend to nothing—not a friend at all. I'm nothing if not a friend."
The sun shone down on grass flattened under new nothing.