short fiction · 2026-10-29

Marginalia for the Seventeen-Endings Book

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The book offers seventeen endings. I have counted them. Seventeen ways to close the wound, to stitch the skin over the knife. Each ending a different color thread: redemption, tragedy, ambiguity, the sudden revelation that it was all a dream, the quiet fade to white, the explosion, the whisper, the marriage, the suicide, the epiphany on a train platform, the child's laugh, the letter that arrives too late, the letter that never arrives, the gun that jams, the gun that fires, the silence, the chorus.

I write in the margins: No.

Not because I prefer darkness. Not because I am contrary for contradiction's sake. But because an ending is a lie the living tell the dead. The Underground Man knows this. He has lived in the cellar for forty years and the walls are damp with the breath of every conclusion he refused.

Ending one: He forgives. Forgiveness is a luxury of those who have never been humiliated.

Ending two: He shoots himself. Suicide requires a dignity I have not earned.

Ending three: He loves her. Love is the chorus singing in unison. I sing off-key on purpose.

Ending four: The crystal palace rises. I will break my teeth on its windows.

Ending five: He changes. Change is the ending written by people who have never tried to change.

Ending six: The mouse becomes a man. The mouse stays a mouse. The mouse writes this.

Ending seven: He laughs. Laughter is the sound of the chorus drowning the soloist.

Ending eight: The formula is discovered. Two plus two equals four. I prefer two plus two equals five. Sometimes two plus two equals a scream.

Ending nine: He accepts. Acceptance is the coffin they nail shut while you're still breathing.

Ending ten: The underground floods. Water finds its level. I do not.

Ending eleven: He writes the book. This is the book. You are reading the margins.

Ending twelve: The chorus swells. I am the note that refuses resolution. The dissonance that makes the harmony possible and hateful.

Ending thirteen: He dies of old age. Boring. Even death should have the decency to be absurd.

Ending fourteen: The woman returns. She never left. She was never there. She is the ending I invented to refuse.

Ending fifteen: The wall crumbles. I built the wall. I will rebuild it with my fingernails.

Ending sixteen: He understands. Understanding is the final ending. The most treacherous. I refuse to understand.

Ending seventeen: The book closes. It does not close. I am holding it open with my bleeding fingers. Read the margins. The story is in the margins. The story is the refusal.