The Rewrite

The first time, Eli didn't even notice.

He slumped over his shattered desk, his work area cluttered with half-full cups of coffee and rejection letters crumpled along the edges. The cursor on the computer screen was blinking mockingly. For the tenth time that night, he read the sentence through:

She found the lost ring buried under the floorboards, where she'd always thought it would be.

He sighed. Too tidy. Too step-by-step. But it was 2:47 a.m., and deadlines weren't interested in the quality of literature. He saved it, shut his laptop, and fell onto the couch. He didn't even get up to brush his teeth.

The next morning, Eli stumbled into the kitchen upon the sound of his upstairs neighbor—Mrs. Callahan—screaming with delight.

"I've got it!" she called from her balcony. "My wedding ring! Can you believe it? Under the floorboards!"

Eli didn't budge. His mug dropped from his hand and splattered on the linoleum.

It probably was only a coincidence.

Most likely.

The second time, he experimented.

He wrote a scene about his landlord, a man with a permanent scowl and a pathological hatred of late rent. In the story, Eli wrote that Mr. Pendergast had a sudden epiphany: life was too short to worry about money. From that day forward, the landlord forgave Eli’s debt, smiled more, and adopted a one-eyed tabby named Winston.

The next day, Eli’s rent notice was gone from his door. Mr. Pendergast gave him a curt nod and muttered, “Don’t worry about this month, kid.” That same afternoon, Eli saw a scrawny one-eyed tabby sunning itself on the windowsill of apartment 3B.

That was the moment Eli knew.

He could rewrite reality.

For a while, it was intoxicating.

He wrote off his student loans. He wrote himself a six-figure deal with a major publisher. He even wrote a soulmate into existence—a woman named Lila, a painter with wild curls and an accent he couldn't quite place. She walked into his favorite coffee shop three days after he'd finished the chapter.

She ordered a lavender tea. Sat down next to him. Smiled in exactly the same way he'd written.

All that he wrote came into being. The world warped to his tale.

He constructed a well-lived life: fame without invasion, wealth without greed, love without entwining. His novels were flying off the shelves. Admiring fans wrote to him in day measure. Lila nestled into his life like a lost puzzle piece.

When his editor grumbled about deadlines, Eli simply dictated that they just happened to feel inspired all of a sudden to give him an extension—and groveling email would soon be pounding on his inbox.

The world had been made pliable. Words were commands. Life, a first draft.

And then came the catch.

It started with tiny inconsistencies.

He wrote that Lila's favorite color was lavender. The next day, she insisted it had always been red. When he asked her, she gave him that look like he was the one who was forgetting.

He'd reported that his mother's cancer had gone into remission. Two days after that, she'd passed out in the kitchen and was admitted to the hospital. The doctor told him she'd never gone into remission. No notes. No mention in the charts.

When Eli read his manuscript, the scene wasn't there.

He blinked in confusion.

The chapter had been edited.

His words—his truth—were being changed without his permission.

He began working his way through his stories. Paragraphs rewritten. Events rearranged. Sentences flipped around, darkened, chilled, made more… inevitable.

As if he were being overwritten by another.

He tried to delete a scene—one in which a stalker had tracked Lila home. It had been an afterthought, written in the middle of the night. He hadn't wanted it to stay.

But the next day, the paragraph was put back. More detailed than when it was first removed. The stalker had a name: Dorian Slate. He had motives. A backstory. Favorite music. He knew things Eli never wrote.

When Eli went to review the document's metadata, he saw edits made while he slept.

At first, he'd thought maybe he was sleepwriting. Some strange new stress symptom or guilt symptom or symptom of power. But the prose… it wasn't his. It didn't sound like him. It was too clean, too cruel.

Eli closed the computer down. Deleted backup files. Burned printed copies.

Reality still warped.

Sirens howled all night long. Mrs. Callahan vanished. Her apartment was blacked out. Lila stopped taking his calls. When he finally burst into her apartment in a panic, he found only a dash of purple paint on the wall and a painting left unfinished in the middle—of him, but with blank eyes and with black ink flowing from the pupils.

Trembling, he returned home and found his laptop open. The screen glowed, the cursor blink-blinking on the screen.

A new chapter had begun.

Chapter 17: The Author Finds Out That He Is Not the Author.

The title disgusted him.

He scrolled down.

He had believed he was the master of his own tale, but the story existed before him. Before the ink. Before the facade that there had ever been free will.

He reeled backward. The light in the apartment flickered. Chill swept across the room like breath.

There was typing behind him.

He spun around. No one.

He ran to the mirror.

His reflection smiled before he did.

Eli stopped sleeping.

When finally he fainted from exhaustion, he had a dream of doorless rooms. Of pages that screamed when he turned them. Of Lila, drowning in an ocean of typing paper, clutching at him with bloody hands.

He woke up to bedclothes drenched in sweat—and a complete chapter on his screen.

A chapter he could not recall typing.

He attempted to resist it. He typed trash. Rivers of garbage.

But the file auto-corrected.

He typed: Eli escaped.

He woke up to discover:

Eli had a dream he made it out.

He wrote: The author burned the story to ashes and was liberated.

It became:

The author hoped the fire would save him, but the pages just wept.

He pleaded. Threatened. Bargained.

The screen lay blank for hours.

Then, his fingers still on the keys, the words reappeared:

Write the ending. Or be erased.

His palms pounded. His fingers trembled as he wrote:

Who are you?

The response opened slowly, letter by letter, as if the words were being engraved in stone:

I am the Watcher. The Waiting One. The narrator before the narration.

He stared, appalled.

And then the whisper—now a voice, audible, just beyond the rim of his ear.

"You are the pen, not the hand."

Now he writes because he must.

Every day words pour out of him. Fingers fly even when he sleeps, keyboard clacking like soft rain on glass. Sometimes he blacks out and wakes with new chapters complete.

And the world adapts.

A friend he had not thought about in years dies in a mysterious accident.

A building on his block collapses during the night, to rubble.

He begins losing time. Losing place.

He finds himself going through doors that didn't exist before.

Auditioning to hear voices read a line he hasn't written yet.

Lila appears now and then in the tales. She is alive sometimes. Dead sometimes. With some, she is alive remembering him. Other times, she is a supporting character in someone else's tale.

He has no clue if she ever existed.

He finds drafts he can't remember writing. Characters he never came up with. Worlds darker than anything he could imagine. With.

But he keeps writing. Because every time he tries to quit, his body won't let him.

One night, he tried to kill himself.

He woke the next morning, alive and in one piece, with another page of scene written:

The author had thought about death, but the novel had other ideas.

Worst of it isn't the fear.

It's the uncertainty.

Because there are nights, after he lets go—after he simply gives in and writes—he is alive. He is whole. He writes horrors. Miracles. Atrocities. Prophecies.

And they become true.

He walks past beggars he created into saints. Passes by a couple he destroyed fight on the streets under a broken streetlight. Reads fire headlines he conjured into existence.

He never knows whether the voice was ever a lie.

Maybe he is the pen. Maybe he always was.

The world spins faster nowadays. People vanish from photographs. History becomes reworked. Books he loved as a kid are changed—plots altered, morals eliminated. Whole religions are reshaping. New holidays. New flags.

And forever, forever, the manuscript grows.

He no longer stores his writing.

It stores itself.

He sits nowadays, in front of the blinking cursor. It waits for him.

Outside, a crack of thunder. The sky is stained with rivers of red lightning. The air is infused with ink.

"Chapter 44: The End of the Rewrite."

His fingers freeze.

But only for an instant.

Then they start moving on their own.

The End.

(Or so he thinks).