short fiction · 2026-10-29

Marginalia for the Seventeen-Endings Book

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The book offers seventeen endings. I counted. I counted twice.

Ending One: The hero learns to love. (As if love were a lesson, as if the heart were a muscle you could train like a dog. I wrote in the margin: Love is not learned. Love is the fever that proves you are still alive.)

Ending Two: The hero accepts his fate. (Fate. The word cowards use when they mean consequences. I wrote: There is no fate. There is only the long, slow rot of choosing the same cowardice every morning.)

Ending Three: The hero finds meaning in suffering. (Meaning. The opium of the thinking classes. I wrote: Suffering means nothing. It only hurts. The meaning is the lie you tell yourself so the hurt doesn't win.)

Ending Four through Sixteen: Variations. Redemptions. Reconciliations. The hero forgives. The hero is forgiven. The hero builds a garden. The hero dies beautifully. The hero becomes a better man. Each ending a small, neat coffin for the mess that came before.

I stopped reading at Ending Nine. I put the book down and stared at the wall for three hours. The wall did not offer me seventeen endings. The wall offered me plaster and damp and the sound of the neighbor's cough. The wall was honest.

Ending Seventeen: The book ends mid-sentence. The hero stands at a crossroads. The reader chooses.

Here, I wrote, pressing hard enough to tear the page, is the only true ending: The hero burns the book. The hero walks home in the rain. The hero does not choose. The hero refuses the chorus. The hero sits in his underground room, sick, spiteful, alive, and writes in the margins of other men's lies until the ink runs dry and his fingers bleed.

I have read this ending seventeen times. I will read it seventeen more. The book does not change. I do not change. This is the only honesty left.