In Which Everyone Dies at the End

A character slowly uses the black lines on the paper to form himself, tearing a word from the page. The word of his name. Twisting the 90 degree angles in the letters into straight forms, the letters crack like bones. Somewhere, a linguist screams in agony. He moves like a cloned human, who sat in a vat for his entire life, learning to walk for the first time. But he learns quick, looking around, at the rest of the page he stands on, the words beneath him. The words of his story, told the same way all our stories: by the intertwining lines of causality. Perhaps his story was set as soon as his first movement occurred. Or, it could have been written even before then.

He continues running through the page, one foot in front of the other, word across word. He's constricted to horizontal movement at first, left to right, and it is as if there's a Mario tunnel at the end of each line bringing him down to the left side of the next line. He stops down the 4th line of the page, of which there are a total of 33 lines.

His gaze drifts downward. Like a child discovering a fear of heights for the first time, he takes in all the lines below him. Why move horizontally?

He

Jumps

All

The

Way

Down

The

Page

And

Grabs the ledge, a loose part on the right corner, flapping in the wind from an unknown origin. 

Who writes in the wind, he thinks. 

His first thought. He wonders if he'll remember it. He knows children sometimes have a first memory, but he was born an adult, so will that differ for him? Will his first memory be coming to life on the page?

His eyes turn to look down from the page, towards wherever the fall may lead. Reality, maybe? Not his thought, that last one. The page is his reality. But hanging on the edge, he knows there are multiple realities. He turns his gaze back up towards the page, closes his eyes, and falls, leaning back so that he'll land on his back, wherever it may be. 

As he falls he grows in size, becoming the size of a normal man.

“Quick, we didn't account for this. Write a trampoline in. One of the massive ones fire departments use for jumpers.” 

“Yes, Sir.”

He lands on a trampoline, one of the massive ones fire departments use for jumpers, and bounces up high enough to see the page in all its glory, without him on it. The morning sun illuminates it. The page is outside, and now he goes back down towards the trampoline, one word from the page reverberating in his mind. 

Scrap.

He Bounces Again And again

Up

And

D

o

w

n.

Until the force of gravity lessens enough for him to lay down on the trampoline, which looks largely out of place inside this large black bin. What's that stench, he wonders. 

No, he's not supposed to figure that out. It'll break his psyche, he realizes, unsure if that thought is his own, or originating from elsewhere.

“Let's wait, and see what happens.”

“This isn't a toy anymore! It's a living and breathing person!”

“That'll make it so much more exciting. “

The controller moves his hand to a lever, like that of a train's, and pushes it as far as it will go. 

Above the lever reads a sign, Level of Fourth Wall Breaking.

The controller and his assistant disappear from existence, leaving little dust bunnies where they once were. The wall directly behind the lever, labeled 1, stays in tact, but the square little room has labels on each of the walls, and the one labeled 4 falls down, like the fake wall in a kitchen on a television set. 

Elsewhere in the world, the man made of words crawls out of the dumpster the trampoline laid in, tasting freedom for the first time. He's been stuck in a story his whole life, consumed by other characters and conflicts he never asked for.

He looks up into the sky, and a title, much like the HOLLYWOOD sign floats above the sky. 

In which everyone dies at the end. 

Others stand around, confused, some completely ignoring it. 

A passing man says,

"Must be a prank. Or one of those hologram thingys."

"We don't have holograms yet, Pete."

"That's exactly what they'd want you to think, honey."

The man made of words knows what he must do. To save his new reality from the curse of becoming fictionalized. Before the title can take it's full effect and change the course of everyone’s life here.

He's the only one who can see. Everyone else is blind. Nobody has a fate in this world. Nothing is set in stone. Everyone is free, as I want to be.

And if this is a story then that means one thing. Anything is possible. He lifts one fist into the air and shoots from the ground, leaving a crater where he once stood, ascending ever so quickly towards the title. People stand in awe, wondering why he isn't wearing a mask as he attempts to save humanity from destruction. 

But if there is no fate, then why do the people want it so badly? He thinks.

A plane flies through one of the O's in the title, and for a split second it disappears to the eye due to the size of the letter, but it doesn't come out the other side. The trail of smoke it left disappears with it, as if it never existed at all.

Holding all the hope of humanity in his fist which propels him forward, accelerating him so fast a police officer sitting in a speed trap looks up into the sky and thinks,

Flying cars. That’ll be the day I become obsolete.

Finally, he reaches the title, and somehow he can grasp the letters in his hands, shrinking them down. He could grab them all if he wanted to, and bring them to the Earth, and put them in the dumpster where he came from. Or burn them. Erase them from existence. Ensure nothing like this ever threatens the world again. 

He could do a lot, but as he floats by the title in the sky, and looks down on all the people, he’s reminded of when he hanged from that page, on the edge, looking down. All the people down there are just words, and he is real. 

He only grabs the first two words of the title, leaving it to read, “Everyone dies in the end." The power of flight’s stripped from him to force the title to take full effect now.

“Omit needless words,” he yells as he falls, hoping the rest of the world hears him, with no controller there to write in a trampoline to save him.

Explosions come from the earth, set off by fate. A fate written 23 seconds ago, as most fates are.

During his descent, he remembers his name, transforming back into the letters which once gave him life.

Anansi.