This is the third installment in an anthology series, all taking place in the fictitious Between. Read Chapter 1, here. Reach Chapter 2, here. Read Chapter 4, here. Read Chapter 5, here. Read Chapter 6, here.

The Writer

“Poor Jack.”

The thought lingers in Sarah’s head as she watches Jack slowly walk back to June and act as if they’re strangers. 

She’s squatted down the street from Jack and June all of her time in the Between — at least what she can remember. She assumes that she’s been erased at least once. It seems that everyone has. 

Even Jack. 

She knows for a fact that he doesn’t think that he ever has. But he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. And he never places the beginning of his time here in its right place whenever he tries to play his time in the Between back again anymore. 

She knows that, because she was here before both of them. 

She imagines it’s happened to him fairly recently, though. She heard him saying the dead can’t feel, again. That means he just doesn’t remember that the numbness wears off as they get further away from the last time the Between had to step in and forcefully course-correct them.  

You may be asking yourself, “How does she know all this, and how does she keep from mixing things up now too?”

Because of one simple thing she’s been sure of all of her existence: She takes damn good notes of what goes on around her. She never misses a thing. She keeps the ones about things that happen in the Between stuffed in her cardigan, most of her pockets almost bursting with them. 

So even if it ever has happened to her, she knows her notes will serve to replenish her memory of the patterns of this place, and every active storyline.  She has seen enough of what happens between Jack and June and everyone else in this literally godforsaken place that she knows how the story always unfolds. 

She’d try to intervene if she didn’t already know from experience that it’s no use. The plot beats refuse to be changed. 

See, in life, she was a writer. No, not famous or anything like that. But she made a decent income off of her stories. 

She just wasn’t happy. 

And while you might say to yourself, “Well, who is?” This was a different kind of unhappiness.

This was the kind of unhappiness where you wake up and it’s already choking you slowly with a lump in your throat you wish would just get the job done already and end it. 

The kind of unhappy that makes every surface disappointing quicksand that you can only sink a little into as you trudge along going through the motions. 

The kind of unhappy that screams its lack of contentment in life in your blood. 

The kind of unhappiness that chips away at your bones from the inside. 

That kind of unhappiness. 

And no, to answer the question you’re thinking, she didn’t kill herself. In fact, she was quite happy when she died. 

On the day she died, Sarah had been walking downtown. It was a slightly biting fall evening — the kind where your nose is ice, but your core is on fire from the layers you’ve packed on. As she often did, Sarah was working out a story in her head. When she was stuck on an ending, in particular, she would try to exercise while she thought about it. 

The easiest form of this would be just to kind of walk out the idea, literally. 

See, for years she had been working on an anthology of short stories. She had saved only what she felt like were her best stories for it. She had friends look over and edit it. 

It was perfect. 

Except for an ending. 

It didn’t have that one story, that one last page or that last line that would cement its status as her masterpiece. 

It had been weeks since she finished the rest of it. She just kept playing over the various endings she thought of for the story in her mind. 

Endings had always been hard for her. It’s not that she didn’t want to finish the story. She really did. It’s that once the story is finished, it’s … finished. You can’t play with it anymore. The characters will be forever left where you left them — suspended there forever. Because no one ever figures out a way to tie up all the loose strings. 

Something is always left hanging. 

But not this time, she told herself. She’s going to wrap it all up perfectly in a little bow, with a card that says, “Read it and weep, motherfuckers” and send it to everyone who ever rejected her stories or doubted her talent. 

She was going to prove everyone wrong once and for all. 

So days went by. Then a week. Then weeks. 

Then, there she was, walking mile after mile hoping that the aching in her legs would somehow produce even one goddamn sentence toward her ending. 

And finally, they did. 

Words started to flow inside her mind, filling its blank canvas up with a full picture of the perfect way to end her book. 

She was so caught up in that rush that washes over a writer when their block finally breaks — that excitement and shock of finally having climbed her personal Everest — that she didn’t hear the car jump the curb. 

When they removed her body from between the car and the hard brick of the building she had been pinned to, the mangled thing hardly resembled the proud author in the photo she had dreamed of one day staring back at her from a copy of her own work. 

The tragedy is, she doesn’t remember the ending now. Whatever that ending was. 

It is lost to the ages. 

She doesn’t even know how long ago she thought of it. Years? Millennia? 

Sometimes maybe she gets a hint, and then she tries to write it down as fast as she can. 

But it’s never quick enough before the thought is gone again. 

Her house in the Between is lined with notes upon notes —- mostly half-finished, some cutting out in the middle of sentences — all starting the same ending, but never completing it. Meanwhile, the rest of the book sits by a typewriter in a neat stack, untouched and gathering dust as it waits. 

“I’ve almost got it,” she tells herself, knowing she’s lying. 

She’ll never get it. She’s not meant to. 

Not here. 

She gives it a valiant effort for a while longer before the inevitable, daily conclusion. 

“Oh, fuck this story,” she blurts out, in the usual white flag ceremony she does routinely before she lies down on the couch and gives up for now. 

But she doesn’t really stop thinking about it.  

She sits there thinking about how little it actually matters if she finishes the story or not. She’s dead. There’s no New York Times  best sellers in the afterlife. There are no literary awards or appreciation events. Oprah’s not popping out of anywhere to put a sticker on anything. 

In fact, no one really reads in the Between. Why would they? What new information do the dead need?

So, she’s not even finishing it for acclaim or the pleasure of sharing her talent.

No, there is no reward in finishing it at all. 

Yet, she won’t let it go. 

She can’t. 

“You can’t just leave your characters in limbo,” she tells herself. “That’s lazy. Everything deserves an ending.”

She glances back out the window at Jack and June, then back to the dusty stack of papers symbolizing her entire life’s work on her table. 

She sighs. 

“Everything deserves an ending.”

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