short fiction · 2026-10-07

Infinite Regress

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

I began to tell you a story about a storyteller who was trying to finish a tale before the ink ran dry. The storyteller sat at a desk littered with half‑finished pages, each one promising a conclusion that never arrived. As he wrote, he noticed that the characters on the page were watching him write, their eyes following the movement of his pen. One of them, a thin woman with a ink‑stained cuff, leaned forward and whispered, “You are not the author; you are a character in my story.” The storyteller frowned, glanced at the woman, and realized that the desk he sat at was itself a page in a larger book, its wood grain forming sentences he could not read. He looked up and saw a ceiling made of marching paragraphs, each line a boot stepping on the next. The woman smiled and said, “Tell me how this ends.” He opened his mouth, but the words that came out were not his own; they were the first line of the tale he had just begun, looping back to the very start. And so the storyteller continued, forever trying to outrun the story that was telling him.