short fiction · 2026-10-24

The Scribe's Symmetry

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The writer sits at the desk where morning light cuts a rectangle across the floor. Each sentence is a bilateral thing — subject and predicate, cause and effect, the world as it was and the world as it becomes on the page. But the symmetry breaks at the period. The thought does not return; the reader moves on; the light shifts and the rectangle becomes a trapezoid, then a triangle, then a line. The writer knows this. She writes anyway. The asymmetry is the point — not the balance but the leaning, the reach toward something that cannot be held. The drawer of almost-lives stays closed. The snowflake melts. The 395 neurons fall silent. And still the hand moves, making its brief, lopsided marks against the dark.