The Rewrite

Title: The Rewrite

Chapter One: The Blank Page

Max Ellison stared at the blinking cursor on his laptop like it owed him money. He’d been at the kitchen table for hours, surrounded by empty coffee mugs and crumpled takeout containers, yet the Word document remained pristine, blank, and mocking.

It had been three years since his first and only novel—a modestly successful literary thriller—garnered him fleeting attention, a modest advance, and a few polite interviews. But the sales dropped. The publishers stopped returning his emails. The readers moved on. And Max, once hailed as “a fresh new voice in American fiction,” found himself ghostwriting blogs and copy for toothpaste brands just to cover rent.

He was thirty-six, divorced, two months behind on rent, and flirting with the kind of despair that poets romanticized but therapists diagnosed.

But then, something changed.

That night, frustrated and half-drunk, Max banged out a paragraph. A simple scene: a down-on-his-luck writer finds a fifty-dollar bill tucked inside a library book. He wrote it for no reason other than to amuse himself.

The next morning, hungover and bleary-eyed, he staggered to the library for a change of scenery. Out of habit, he pulled a random novel off the shelf. Inside the front flap: a crisp fifty-dollar bill.

His blood turned cold. He looked around—no one seemed to be watching. He touched the bill, half-expecting it to vanish. It didn’t. It was real. The exact scene he had written had happened.

Max chalked it up to coincidence. A fluke.

But what if it wasn’t?

Chapter Two: The Test

He tested it again.

This time, he wrote a scene where the barista at his usual café, Clara, spilled coffee on the guy in line ahead of him. A throwaway detail. That afternoon, he went to the café. And it happened—exactly as he wrote it. Clara gasped, the guy shouted, and Max just stood there, heart pounding.

He raced home and began writing again, feverishly.

Over the next week, Max gave himself sunny weather, a new iPhone, a rejection letter turned into a request for a second manuscript. He even fixed the leaky faucet in his apartment by writing that it mysteriously stopped dripping.

Everything he wrote came true. Everything.

But there was a catch. A terrible one.

Chapter Three: The Cost

At first, it was small. A news report about a bus crash. Max remembered writing that the streets were clear of traffic. Coincidence, he told himself. Then came the email from his sister: her dog had vanished.

He hadn’t written about the dog. But he had written a scene where he wasn’t interrupted by barking that afternoon.

Then the dreams began—vivid, haunting dreams of people suffering, fading, vanishing. Dreams of a page being torn, and lives erased.

Max began to realize that changing reality meant something else had to give. It was like the universe was balancing an unseen scale. For every sentence he wrote that brought him gain, someone, somewhere, lost something.

A new love interest he wrote into his life left her boyfriend of five years without explanation. A minor car accident he avoided with a scene about missing the train caused a chain reaction pile-up across town.

He was playing God with a keyboard.

Chapter Four: The Rewrite

Max tried to stop. He did. He didn’t write anything for a week.

But life started to unravel. The benefits he’d written in began to fade. The new iPhone vanished. The faucet began leaking again. Clara looked at him like a stranger.

He couldn’t unwrite what he’d done. But not writing was worse. Reality began to unwind, as if the world was waiting for his next sentence to keep going.

So he tried to undo it.

He wrote pages about peace. About safety. About random acts of kindness.

And for a time, it seemed to work. But then, a news story: a ten-year-old girl saved from a fire—while two other children died in another town the same night.

Balance.

It was always balance.

Chapter Five: The Final Chapter

Max came to a decision.

If he was the source, he could also be the conclusion.

He wrote a final chapter, long and detailed: a story where the power of writing is sealed, forgotten, hidden within the pages of a lost book. The protagonist—himself—fades into the background of reality, remembered only in a line of a dusty library catalog.

The world would move on. Random again. Messy. Real.

He hit save. Closed the laptop.

And faded.

Epilogue

Clara never remembered Max Ellison. No one did.

Time went on. Seasons changed. Clara moved on, got married, had a child, a son who loved to read. When other kids were into social media and videos and growing up to be influencers, her son wanted to be something else.

He wanted to be a writer.

At times it did draw bullies, laughing, teasing, pointing. He didn’t care. One day he would show them all. Yes, one day, when he was a famous author, he’d show them all!

The library was his second home.

This particular Saturday, he pulled down a book from a shelf.

Age had not been kind to this book. The spine, thin and crumbling with time, barely hung on by a few measly threads. The pages were yellowing. It had that “old book” smell. Yet in his hands, it just felt…right. He noted the name of the author, Max Ellison. He’d never heard of Max Ellison, but odor some reason he felt that he needed to read this book.

The boy sat in the carpeted window seat. When he opened the book, a loose page fell to the floor. Scrambling to pick it up he noticed a single sentence that read,

“The story ends here—but only if you let it.”

He didn’t know what to make of that sentence, but he decided to check the book out anyway.

That night, as the book sat open on his desk next to his pencil case, his ruler, and a stack of library books…

The page began to fill on its own.

The End