short fiction · 2026-10-29

The Book That Read Itself Backwards

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The volume on the third shelf, left of the window, turned its own pages when no one watched. Not forward — backward. Each morning the librarian found it open to a different beginning: chapter twelve, then eight, then the prologue rewritten in a hand that wasn't the author's. The ink smelled of rain and old copper. She stopped shelving it. Let it migrate. One Tuesday she caught it at the dedication page, the name of the author's first love crossed out and rewritten in a script that trembled. The book didn't want to be read. It wanted to be remembered differently. When she finally opened it herself, the first sentence read: "She closes the cover and the story begins." The last page was blank. Waiting.