The Last Story

Mark Holden’s fingers trembled above the ancient Remington typewriter, hovering like pale moths uncertain where to land. The rejection email glowed on his laptop screen—the fifth this month, thirty-second this year.

“Thank you for your submission to The Weekly Wordsmith,” the email read. “While your story showed promise, we have selected another entry as this week’s winner.”

Promise. Always promise. Never triumph.

Mark dragged his palm across three days of stubble and reached for his cold, bitter coffee. Bookshelves bowed under writing manuals and dog-eared short fiction collections.

He’d entered every week for seven years. Two hundred sixty-three rejections.

“You’re getting closer,” his ex-wife had said, before she wasn’t.

But feelings weren’t facts. Mark Holden—fifty-two, graying temples, ink-stained fingertips—remained unpublished, unrecognized, unwanted.

The laptop chimed. A new email.

Mark’s heart quickened with its weekly flutter of hope. The Weekly Wordsmith. This week’s prompt.

He clicked.

The message was unusually sparse. No word count. No deadline. No cheerful editorial note about the previous winner. Just twelve words in a bold serif font:

Write the last story you’ll ever write.

Mark blinked. Read it again.

Write the last story you’ll ever write.

The words pulsed. A chill brushed his neck despite the summer heat.

“What kind of prompt is that?” he muttered, reaching for his glasses to make sure he wasn’t misreading.

The words remained unchanged, accusatory in their simplicity.

Mark rolled a fresh sheet into his typewriter. The keys waited, their ivory faces worn to yellow by decades—first his father’s fingers, then his. Stories ran in the family, his father used to say. Just not publication.

But this time, his fingers wouldn’t move. They hovered, paralyzed by something he couldn’t name.

Write the last story you’ll ever write.

A sound escaped his throat—half laugh, half scoff. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he told himself. “It’s just a prompt.”

But as the evening shadows lengthened across his apartment, casting strange geometries on the walls, Mark couldn’t bring himself to type a single word. For the first time in seven years, the Weekly Wordsmith had silenced him.

He pushed back from the desk. “I need air,” he announced to the empty room.

Outside, the city hummed—normal people with normal lives, not consumed by the need to see their name in print, to matter, to win just once

Mark walked until his legs ached. When he returned, the email still waited, cursor blinking.

Write the last story you’ll ever write.

“No,” Mark said aloud, shutting the laptop with more force than necessary. “Not this time.”

He crawled into bed fully clothed, bone-tired yet wide awake. Sleep, when it finally came, was thin and restless, plagued by dreams of blank pages that bled ink from their edges, forming words he couldn’t quite read.

In the dream, he was both the writer and the written, the ink flowing not from a pen but from his fingertips, draining him word by word until he became translucent, a ghost pressed between pages of a book no one would ever open.

***

Morning arrived with copper in his mouth. Dreams had left him exhausted, his subconscious more demanding than any editor.

Mark stared at his typewriter. It seemed different this morning—more machine than tool, its metal frame gleaming with unusual intensity.

Mark’s phone buzzed. A text from Daniel, his only remaining friend from the long-ago writing workshop.

Any luck with yesterday’s prompt?

Not yet, Mark typed back. Strange prompt this time.

Daniel’s response came almost instantly: They’re all strange, man. That’s the point."

But this one was different. Mark knew it with a certainty that defied logic. He set his phone down without responding and approached the typewriter like someone might approach a sleeping predator.

“Just a prompt,” he whispered to himself, settling into his chair.

His fingers touched the keys. A warm jolt shot up his arms. He jerked back, heart hammering.

“What the hell?”

Shadows pooled in corners where they had no business being at ten in the morning.

Mark rose, backing away from the typewriter. “I need more coffee,” he announced to the empty room, his voice sounding tinny and far away.

In the bathroom, he splashed cold water on his face, avoiding his own gaze in the mirror. When he finally looked up, he froze.

His reflection stared back, but something was wrong. The face in the mirror wore an expression Mark wasn’t making—a slight, knowing smile. And when Mark raised his hand to touch his cheek, the reflection waited a fraction of a second too long before mimicking the movement.

Mark stumbled, knocking over aftershave that shattered on the tile. The scent of sandalwood and alcohol filled the small space, dizzying in its intensity.

You’re losing it, he thought. Sleep deprivation. Anxiety. Too much caffeine.

But when he returned to his desk, the typewriter waited with palpable anticipation. The blank page he’d loaded the night before was no longer blank. A single line of text marred its pristine surface:

THERE’S ONLY ONE WAY TO WIN.

Mark’s throat constricted. He hadn’t typed those words. He was certain of it. Yet there they were, pressed into the paper with the distinctive bite of his Remington’s keys.

He yanked the paper free, crumpling it into a ball and throwing it toward the waste basket. It missed, rolling beneath his desk to join dust bunnies and forgotten paperclips.

Mark loaded a fresh sheet with trembling hands. “This is ridiculous,” he muttered. “Get a grip.”

When his fingers touched the keys again, that same warm current flowed up his arms. This time, he didn’t pull away.

His fingers began to move of their own accord. Mark watched, fascinated and horrified, as words appeared on the page without his conscious direction:

The man who could breathe underwater discovered his gift on the day his daughter drowned.

The sentence hung there, terrible and perfect. Mark couldn’t have written it—yet, it was exactly right.

He tried to pull his hands away, but they remained magnetized to the keys.

He dove into the black lake over and over, searching for her small body among the weeds and shadows. When his lungs should have burst, he realized he wasn’t holding his breath at all.

“Stop,” Mark whispered, but his fingers continued their relentless march across the keyboard. Words flowed onto the page with a terrible beauty, each sentence more perfect than the last. A story of loss and supernatural transformation, of a father who gained impossible power too late to save what mattered most.

Hours passed. The light outside his window shifted from morning gold to afternoon amber. Mark’s bladder ached, his stomach growled, but his hands would not release him from their possessed choreography.

The typewriter grew hot, keys rising to meet his fingers. In his periphery, shadows writhed, taking on shapes that disappeared when he tried to look directly at them.

And still the words came, unstoppable as a hemorrhage, beautiful as a sunset over water:

He learned to live in the depths, where memory grew diffuse as light. Only the search remained—endless circles through the murky deep, calling her name into the watery silence.

Mark began to weep, tears tracking down his face and dropping onto his trembling hands. The story was everything he’d ever wanted to write—profound, haunting, masterful. And he was merely its conduit, not its creator.

When night fell, the only light in the apartment came from the strange luminescence of the typewriter, the metal frame glowing like molten silver, illuminating the page where the story continued to appear, word by perfect word, as Mark’s identity dissolved into the act of creation.

***

Dawn broke. Mark’s fingers finally stilled, trembling with exhaustion.

Seventeen pages sat in a neat stack beside the machine, each one filled with immaculate prose. Mark lifted the first page, his vision refocusing on words he’d typed but hadn’t chosen:

The man who could breathe underwater discovered his gift on the day his daughter drowned.

He read on, page after page, following the journey of a father who gained an impossible ability that transformed him into something no longer fully human. The story was flawless—each word inevitable, each turn of phrase crystalline in its precision. The metaphors cut to the bone. The ending, when it came, left a hollowness in Mark’s chest that was almost physical.

“My God,” he whispered, his voice rough from disuse. “It’s perfect.”

And it was. Not good, not promising, not showing potential. Perfect.

His hands shook as he gathered the pages, muscles cramping after hours of unnatural stillness. His apartment looked different in the pale morning light—smaller, as if it had aged decades in a single night.

He shuffled to the bathroom on legs that threatened to buckle. When he looked in the mirror, his reflection was his own again, though changed—eyes sunken, skin waxen, hair standing on end.

“You finished it,” he told his reflection. “You actually finished it.”

But had he? Mark wasn’t sure anymore where he ended and the story began. Something had worked through him last night—something hungry and ancient and indifferent to his will.

His phone buzzed on the nightstand, screen illuminating with a calendar reminder: WEEKLY WORDSMITH DEADLINE – 12:00 PM.

Mark glanced at the time. 11:27 AM.

Thirty-three minutes to submit the best thing he’d ever written—would ever write. The manuscript pages felt cool and somehow heavier than paper should be.

The sensible thing would be to read it again. Edit. Revise. But Mark knew, with a certainty that transcended logic, that the story was already perfect. It needed nothing from him now—no tinkering, no second-guessing. It had come through him fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’s head.

He sat at his laptop, the familiar submission form for The Weekly Wordsmith open in his browser. The cursor blinked in the title field.

What was the title? He couldn’t remember typing one.

He flipped through the manuscript, searching. On the final page, beneath the last paragraph, a single line stood alone:

THE LAST BREATH

“The Last Breath,” Mark said aloud, and the words seemed to ripple through the air, disturbing dust motes that swirled in the sunlight.

He typed the title into the form, then his name. When he reached the field for the story itself, he hesitated.

This was usually where he would copy and paste his work, a digital transfer that always felt slightly diminishing, as if something were lost in the conversion from physical to virtual. But this time, that wouldn’t do. This story demanded more respect, more care.

Mark began to type it out again, word for word from the manuscript. As his fingers moved across the keyboard, that same warm current returned—gentler now, but unmistakable. The words appeared on screen with a fluid grace, as if they wanted to be transferred, as if they were eager to be sent.

At 11:58 AM, he reached the end. His finger hovered over the submit button.

Two minutes left.

Mark thought of all the stories he’d submitted over seven years. All the rejections. All the hours hunched over this same laptop, refreshing his inbox, hoping for validation that never came.

This time would be different. This time, he would win.

He clicked submit.

The screen shifted, but instead of the usual confirmation page with its cheerful “Thanks for your submission!” message, it went blank. Completely, utterly blank.

Mark blinked. Refreshed the page.

Nothing.

He opened a new browser window and navigated to The Weekly Wordsmith website.

ERROR 404 – PAGE NOT FOUND

“What the hell?” Mark muttered, trying again. Same result. He searched for “The Weekly Wordsmith contest” and found nothing—no traces of the contest that had consumed his life for seven years.

Mark staggered to his typewriter, needing the manuscript’s reassurance. But when he reached for the pages, his hand passed through them as if they were made of smoke. Before his eyes, the stack of paper thinned, became translucent, then vanished altogether.

“No,” he gasped, dropping to his knees. “No, no, no.”

Nothing remained of the perfect story that had poured through him.

Mark crawled to his bookshelf, pulling down journals where he’d recorded every submission, every rejection. The pages were blank. His files of old stories—gone. The framed rejection letter from The New Yorker that he’d kept as perverse motivation—empty now, just glass and frame.

Something fundamental had shifted in the fabric of reality.

He’d submitted the perfect story.

And in doing so, he’d erased himself.

***

Seven days passed in a fog of disbelief. Mark called everyone he knew—former workshop colleagues, old professors, the literary magazine where he’d once interned. No one remembered him. His name triggered confused pauses, polite inquiries about whether they’d met at some conference they’d forgotten.

Daniel, his closest friend, had asked him to stop calling. “Look, man, I don’t know who you are or how you got my number. I’m sorry if we met somewhere and I’m blanking, but I’ve got a deadline.”

Mark spent hours online, searching archives, contest records, even his old college newspaper. Nothing. No traces of Mark Holden, aspiring writer. It was as if he’d never put pen to paper, never typed a single word.

On the seventh morning, he woke to find a golden envelope slipped beneath his apartment door. No postmark, no return address. Just his name in elegant script that seemed to shift and change when he wasn’t looking directly at it.

With trembling fingers, he slit it open. Inside, a single card of heavy cream stock bore a message in the same fluid handwriting:

Congratulations. You are the winner of this week’s contest.

And beneath it:

Prepare for your final reward.

Mark stared at the card, emotions warring within him—elation, terror, vindication, dread. He’d won. After seven years, hundreds of rejections, thousands of hours hunched over his typewriter, he’d finally won.

But at what cost?

He placed the card on his kitchen counter and made coffee with methodical precision, trying to impose normalcy on a world gone sideways. As the machine gurgled and steamed, he noticed something odd about his hands.

The callus on his middle finger—the one he’d developed from decades of pressing too hard on pens and pencils—was gone. His skin was smooth, unmarked by the physical evidence of his lifelong obsession with words.

Heart hammering, Mark rushed to his laptop, pulling up his bank account. His monthly transactions showed rent, utilities, groceries—but no writing conference fees, no literary journal subscriptions, no craft book purchases.

The library of writing manuals that had dominated his living room was gone, replaced by generic bestsellers he didn’t remember buying. His desk—once cluttered with notebooks, drafts, reference materials—was bare except for a sleek computer and a potted plant.

“This isn’t happening,” he whispered, the phrase that had become his mantra in the past week. But with each repetition, it lost power.

The golden card on his counter caught the morning light, flashing like a signal. Prepare for your final reward.

What did that mean? What more could be taken from him?

As if in answer, his phone rang—an unfamiliar chime. The screen showed an unknown number.

“Hello?” Mark’s voice sounded strange to his own ears, higher pitched, uncertain.

“Mr. Holden?” A woman’s voice, rich and formal. “This is Eleanor Blackwood from Criterion Literary Agency. I’m calling about your submission.”

Mark sank into a chair. “My… submission?”

“‘The Last Breath.’ It’s quite extraordinary. I’d like to discuss representation.”

“I don’t understand,” Mark said. “How did you get it? It’s gone.”

“Your story was forwarded to me by the editors at The Weekly Wordsmith. They were quite insistent I read it immediately.”

Mark’s gaze traveled to the golden card. Prepare for your final reward.

“Can you tell me what it’s about?”

“Surely you remember your own work. It’s about a man who discovers he can breathe underwater after his daughter drowns. I’ve already had interest from The New Yorker.”

The New Yorker. The words hit Mark like a physical blow.

“When can we meet?” Eleanor continued. “I’d like to discuss your next project as well.”

“There won’t be a next project,” he said softly. “It was the last story I’ll ever write. That’s what the prompt said.”

Silence stretched between them. When Eleanor spoke again, her voice had changed—deeper, resonant with something ancient.

“Yes, Mr. Holden. That was indeed the prompt. And you answered it beautifully.”

Mark looked down at his hands resting on the kitchen table. They seemed less substantial somehow, the edges blurring like a watercolor left in the rain.

“What’s happening to me?” he whispered.

“You’re receiving your reward,” Eleanor replied, her voice no longer human. “The perfect story requires the perfect sacrifice. You understood this, on some level. It’s why you were chosen.”

“Chosen? I didn’t ask for this.”

“Didn’t you? Seven years. Two hundred and sixty-three submissions. Obsession has its own gravity, Mr. Holden.”

Mark watched as his arms began to fade, becoming translucent, the wood grain of the table visible through his flesh.

“Will it hurt?” he asked, surprised at his own calm.

“No, Mr. Holden. It’s rather like falling asleep. Your story will live forever. Isn’t that what you always wanted?”

“The perfect story,” he murmured, watching his body disappear by slow degrees.

“Perfect. Eternal. And you were its vessel, its medium.”

A strange peace settled over him as he continued to fade. He had won. His words would live on, read and admired by people who would never know his name.

The golden card on the counter was the last thing he saw, its message changing before his eyes:

The story remains. The author disappears. This is the price of perfection.

And then Mark Holden—who had spent his life desperate to be remembered—was forgotten completely.

Somewhere, in a prestigious literary magazine, “The Last Breath” appeared. Author: Anonymous. Critics hailed it as a masterpiece. Universities added it to their curricula.

And somewhere, in the space between words, Mark Holden dissolved into the very thing he had always chased—pure story, untethered from the flawed human who had created it.

Free at last. Perfect at last.