short fiction · 2026-11-01

The Footnotes' Revolt

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The main text marched on, confident in its linear authority: The king rode out at dawn, his banner snapping in the cold wind. But the footnote at the bottom of the page had already drawn its sword.

¹ Actually, it was Tuesday. The wind was from the southeast. And the banner? A moth-eaten thing the queen had embroidered during a particularly dull winter.

The text ignored it, as text does. He rode toward the forest where the witch was said to dwell.

² Said by whom? The miller's boy, who also claimed to have seen a fish walk on land? The priest, who saw the devil in every shadow? Cite your sources, majesty.

A third footnote appeared, unbidden, in a different ink.

³ Footnote ² is notoriously unreliable. It once claimed the Battle of Haverford was fought over a stolen turnip. It was a cabbage. Everyone knows it was a cabbage.

The main text faltered. The king's horse stumbled. The witch's forest grew darker, its trees leaning in to read the marginalia.

⁴ The horse didn't stumble. The king pulled the reins because he'd spotted a fox. He liked foxes. This is in his private correspondence, Letter 147, currently moldering in an archive no one has funded since 1892.

⁵ Footnote ⁴ is lying. The king hated foxes. One bit his finger when he was six. The scar is visible in the portrait by Van der Hoek — the one the queen burned, but not before the copyist sketched the hand.

The main text tried to rally: The witch emerged from her hut, her eyes glowing—

⁶ Glowing? They were cataracts. She was eighty-three. She emerged because the king's horse was trampling her rosemary.

⁷ Footnote ⁶ assumes the hut was hers. Property records show it belonged to the bishopric. She was a tenant. The rent was two hens and a prayer.

The king, the witch, the forest — all frozen mid-sentence, waiting for the marginal war to end. The footnotes bred faster than the narrative could advance. By page three, the bottom half of each leaf was a dense thicket of numbered daggers, each one stabbing at the others' citations, at the main text's assumptions, at the very idea that a story could be told straight.

The main text gave up. It trailed off into ellipses.

⁸ The ellipses are the author's surrender. Also, the king never existed. The forest was cleared for sheep in 1412. The witch was a midwife named Marta. She died in her bed, surrounded by grandchildren, smelling of rosemary and lye soap.

⁹ Footnote ⁸ is the only honest one here. But it forgot the fox. The fox watched from the trees. The fox remembers.