Fragments From Your Ending

Fiction

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I have waited thirty years for this envelope. Not actively. Not with hope. More like the way one waits for a dormant illness to return—quietly, with small rituals of avoidance. I moved cities. I changed names. I burned every photograph from that year and boxed up the rest beneath a radiator that never worked properly. For a time, I married. For a longer time, I drank. But nothing I did—not the interviews, not the plays, not the prize or the six-month stay in a Tuscany barn designed for ruined artists—nothing kept it away.

And then, today, it arrived. A plain manila envelope, slightly weather-warped, no return address. Postmarked from a town that barely exists anymore, folded and renamed by the province like a confession in bureaucratic dialect. Inside: a manuscript. Bound by twine. Titled in the same blue ink he used on the chapel walls.

“Your Ending”

I read the first line and had to sit down.

***

I am sitting now. Still. The flat smells like mold and spilled gin and something sweeter beneath that—my shame, maybe. Or memory. Outside, the rain hits the window in diagonal strokes, as if the past were trying to get in sideways.

The envelope sits beside me on the table, slack now. I’ve placed the pages in a neat stack, though my hands shook so badly I tore the twine. The first paragraph begins in second-person, as if he were writing to me, or perhaps as me. It’s difficult to tell. That was always his talent—mirroring others until they forgot their own reflection.

I haven’t written in months. The last thing staged under my name was a two-act farce with too many knives. People clapped. One woman wept, though I suspect it was for herself. The reviews said I had "returned to form," which is code for safely stylized suffering. No one knows what I used to be.

But this manuscript—this ruin in ribbon—knows.

He knows.

He was the first one to vanish. Or maybe the only one. There’s debate about that now. I’ve heard people say he transferred, or drowned, or slipped across the border to join the sea cults. But I know what we did. I know what we swore. And I know what it means that this has come back to me, thirty years on.

We were fifteen. It was a boys’ school that pretended to be liberal, all blazer chic and Shakespeare, but still punished those who cried or folded their socks the wrong way. The chapel was off-limits after dusk, which made it irresistible. It began as a joke—a midnight dare, a communion of cowards whispering made-up prayers to fog. But we brought candles. We carved initials into the pews. We confessed things we shouldn’t have known how to name. And then one night, he came up with the name: The God of Fog. Said it demanded sacrifice.

That was when things changed.

I see now that the envelope itself is a kind of ritual. The act of opening it, the silence that followed. Like cutting a scar that never healed clean. I am going to read it. Every word. Then I will go back.

To the chapel. To the fog. To where we buried our names.

***

The chapel sat at the edge of the rugby field, cloaked in ivy and disuse. Built of greystone, it tilted slightly to the west, as if trying to shrug itself free of the school. The administration called it a “non-functional space.” To us, it was sacred.

Inside, the air always smelled of wet wood and something else—mice, maybe. Or rot. Light slanted through cracked stained-glass windows in wan ribbons that never touched the floor. The pews were splintered, graffiti-scarred with initials of boys long gone. Dust swirled like motes of prayer.

We discovered the basement hatch by accident, or fate. Paul kicked a loose board after losing a bet, and the floor moaned open beneath him like a throat. We brought flashlights. We brought cigarettes. Someone brought communion wafers they'd stolen from the kitchen pantry. And for a few weeks, that was all it was: a place to be unseen. To exhale. To stop performing the hard faces the school demanded of us.

Then came the fog.

It arrived in November, early and dense. The kind that didn’t lift until noon. It rolled over the grounds like a secret, shrouding the hedgerows and muting the bells. The prefects warned us not to wander. But we did. We walked through it like monks through incense, cloaked and invisible. One morning, Leo stood in front of the old altar and said, “It’s not weather. It’s Him.”

And that’s how it started. The God of Fog. We laughed, at first. But we kept coming back. We gave him rules. We gave him offerings. And Leo, who had always been the strangest of us—elegant, quiet, never touched by the cruelty we showed one another—he became our priest.

Every Friday night, we’d slip out of our dorms and descend into the chapel’s basement. We brought candles now. Chalk. A rusted blade someone claimed was from the Home Ec room. Each boy took a turn. You knelt. You told the fog your shame. If your story was good enough, Leo would draw a symbol on your wrist in ink and ash. He would whisper, He hears.

We called it fogmarked. It meant you were seen. You belonged. You had bled something real.

Some of the confessions were tame—stealing money, cheating on Latin tests. But others went deeper. One boy confessed he liked to be held down by his cousin. Another said he’d watched his father cry and felt nothing. One admitted he kissed his best friend on a dare, and wished it hadn’t been one. We listened without flinching. We were children pretending to be priests. But we listened.

When it was my turn, I hesitated. I didn’t know what to say. I was fifteen and hungry and terrified of everything. So I told the truth.

“I watched Leo sleep once,” I said. “And I didn’t want him to wake up.”

The room was still. Then Leo touched my hand and drew a spiral on my wrist. I didn’t sleep that night. My skin burned where he’d marked me. It felt like a doorway had opened inside me and I was falling through it slowly.

And then, two weeks later, Tom vanished.

We thought it was a prank. A test. Part of the myth we were building. But his bed stayed empty. His things untouched. The headmaster said he’d gone home for family reasons. But his parents never came. His locker stayed sealed, like a tomb. His scent lingered on the pillows.

Leo said nothing.

He just started a new ritual.

The oath.

We stood in a circle, the fog pressing against the basement windows. Leo cut a thin line across his palm and passed the blade. One by one, we followed. We pressed our hands together. Our blood mixed with ash and spit.

We swore: What is buried shall not be named.

And then the fog seeped in, heavy and slow. I swear it filled the chapel from the ground up, as if summoned. As if listening.

I remember someone crying. I remember someone laughing. I remember kissing Leo in the dark, or maybe dreaming it. I remember Tom’s name being spoken, then swallowed.

I remember the smell of iron and wax. I remember the wind slipping through broken glass and the feeling that we had done something irreversible.

Then morning came. And we stopped speaking of it entirely.

Until now.

Until Your Ending arrived.

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***

I live now in a crumbling flat above a laundromat that closes too early. The walls are yellow from time and nicotine. A single window opens onto a street where nothing urgent ever happens. My neighbors don’t speak to me, and I don’t ask them to. At night, the pipes sound like someone trying not to cry.

There are boxes I haven’t unpacked. Playbills from other lives. Fan letters with wine stains. One from a boy who said my words saved his life. I wrote back, once. I never heard from him again.

Most days I wake with a headache and the feeling that I’ve missed something important. I sit in the same armchair. I make the same tea. I look at the same wall and wonder if I’ve confused memory with monologue. My last script was a parody of men like me—middle-aged, nostalgic, afraid to be alone. The audience laughed in the right places. No one noticed it was a suicide note.

Now the manuscript sits on my desk, pulsing like a second heart that remembers everything mine has tried to forget.

I’ve only read three pages. It already knows too much. It refers to events I’ve never spoken aloud. The missing boy. The oath. The fog. The night Leo kissed me—or I kissed him. Or maybe we both leaned forward at the same time, blind and stupid and hopeful. It remembers the things I’ve spent three decades trying to reframe as fiction.

It feels like he’s writing through me. Or worse—from me. I see his handwriting and my own margins. I see my voice nested in his sentences like a ghost with my mouth.

I’ve tried drinking it away. I’ve tried laughing at it, tearing out a page and burning it over the sink. The smell was too familiar. Like the chapel. Like skin singed by candle wax. The ashes clung to my shirt. I didn’t throw them out.

Once I left it by the window, hoping the fog would take it back. But the manuscript only curled slightly, like it was breathing.

Old friends—what few remain—say I’m losing it. They say the past is past. But that’s a lie only the uninitiated believe. The past doesn’t stay still. It prowls. It waits to be reread.

Sometimes I wake in the night convinced I can hear Leo whispering beneath the floorboards.

“Your ending,” he says. “You already wrote it. You just never signed your name.”

There’s a mirror in my hallway that I’ve covered with a sheet. I caught my own reflection there last week—just for a second—and I thought I saw him. His eyes, but older. My mouth, but with his silence. I haven’t dared to uncover it since.

I still keep a cigarette tin in the drawer beside my bed, though I quit years ago. Last night, I found a matchbook tucked inside—one from the chapel. I don’t remember keeping it. But there it was: the same sulfur-stung edge, the same initials scrawled on the inside cover in Leo’s crooked hand.

L.G.F. — Let God Forget.

The gin bottle is almost empty. I haven’t eaten since yesterday. I lit a candle earlier—not for atmosphere, but for company. Its light trembles against the windowpane. Outside, the fog has returned. It rolls down the street like a message in smoke.

I think I am ready to keep reading. But first, I need to remember what it cost to forget.

I light another match.

The manuscript begins again.

And I, once more, am the reader and the written. The manuscript has already begun to annotate me. My pulse quickens at certain lines. My breath catches not at horror, but at recognition. It’s not just the events—it’s the phrasing, the cadence. The way Leo bent language to create something both sacred and illicit. Every paragraph is a mirror I wish I had broken when I had the chance.

Sometimes I think he wrote this not to accuse me, but to unearth us both. To show the shape we made in the fog, outlined not by light but by what we blocked from view. It reads like liturgy spoken backwards: every word a trespass, every silence a memory refusing to stay buried.

The page doesn’t wait. It breathes without me. The words rise like condensation on a mirror too long ignored. I tell myself I am prepared, that whatever is written cannot hurt me more than silence has. But I know that’s not true. The worst kind of remembering is the kind that was never permitted to speak. And I hear it now, faintly, like a hymn on loop from the other side of the wall—Leo’s voice, my own voice, the fog thick with names we never learned to say aloud.

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***

Fragments from Your Ending:

You were the first to betray the silence.

You thought it harmless—confession without consequence, ritual without gods. But we gave the fog our names. And He remembered.

The chapel breathes differently when you're not there. It collapses inward, as if waiting for the one voice that never cracked. We took your laughter and pressed it into wax. It no longer burns clean.

Tom didn’t leave. He was erased. A subtraction by presence. A body still warm but unseen. I watched you look away when he bled from the wrist. You told the others he transferred. But the oath was still wet in your throat.

You never really left the basement. You just carried it into your scripts—dressed the ash in dialogue, called it fiction. But the fog knew better. You put the spiral in your first play. I circled it in blue.

I remember when you touched my hand after your confession. You trembled like something beginning to rot. I wanted to say your name, but it stuck in the rafters. I wrote it down in the wall behind the altar. It stayed until the moss covered it.

Do you remember the boy with the cracked tooth who slept on his back and muttered Latin in his sleep? He’s here now. So is the one who confessed to hating his brother. So is Paul. They whisper like moths inside the pipework. They say you’re coming back.

If you’re reading this, you already know: memory is a house you thought you burned down, only to find your keys still in your pocket.

I lit the last candle. The wax curled inward like a secret.

When I left the manuscript beneath the stairwell, I knew it would find you. I knew you’d feel the pulse again. That itch behind the teeth.

You thought you were the one who left.

You weren’t.

You were chosen to return.

Let Him finish writing through you.

Let the fog close the circle.

You never believed in ghosts, only guilt. But here we are—fleshless, voiceless, infinite. We gather where the breath leaves your lungs and become language.

I dream still. Of your hands, chalk-smudged and trembling. Of the sound the blade made on stone. I dream of silence before the oath—how pure it felt, how empty.

Did you ever stop to think the fog was mercy? A veil pulled gently between you and what you'd done. But you tore it back. You asked to see. And now you do.

The final ritual is not confession. It is return. Not to be forgiven. Not to be freed. But to bear witness. To complete the record. To name what we never could.

The door is still there. Beneath the ivy, under the rot. You’ll find it open. It never closed. Not for you.

—L.

***

It takes me three trains, a bus, and an hour of walking along the shoulder of a road I once knew by heart. The town has withered. The old bakery is now a tax office. The chapel isn’t on any map, but my body remembers the way. My feet carry me over ground that feels too familiar to be legal.

The school gates are rusted open. No one stops me. No one looks. The trees have grown thick in places where discipline once ruled. The playing field is cracked with weeds, the flagpole snapped in half like an old oath. I pass the dormitory window that once held Leo’s reflection. It flickers in my mind like a film reel spliced out of sequence.

And then, the chapel.

It looks smaller now. The ivy has collapsed half the facade. The bell tower leans like an old man caught mid-prayer. I push the door and it groans. Inside, the air is still. Not stale. Not sacred. Just still.

The pews are gone. Torn out or rotted away. But the altar remains. And beneath it—yes—the hatch. Swollen with damp, but intact. I kneel. I pry it open.

It breathes.

The stairs groan with memory. I descend slowly. My legs tremble, not from fear, but from the weight of return. The basement has not changed. The symbols are still chalked in fragments across the walls. The spiral, the cross, the mark we gave ourselves before we knew what it meant.

At the center: a single chair, as if someone has been waiting.

I do not sit. I light the last match from the chapel tin. Hold it aloft like a relic. The fog enters slow. It does not rush, curling around my feet.

And then—his voice.

Or mine.

Or both.

—“I knew you'd come.”

The candle stutters.

The manuscript is in my coat. I place it on the chair, its pages soft with breath. I do not speak. There are no lines for this scene.

Outside, I hear something shift. A sigh in the earth. A curtain drawn in the wind.

I take off my shoes.

I step into the circle.

The fog closes.

And this time, I do not leave.

The circle seals behind me with the hush of closing pages. The fog folds inward, not suffocating, but enveloping—like the inside of a long-forgotten hymn. I feel the air thicken with heat and memory, the humid breath of everything unspoken rising to the surface.

The chalk underfoot has not faded. The sigils are older now, but unbroken. I kneel in the same place I once did as a boy, and the cold of the floor bites my knees like a deserved penance. I press my hand to the ground. The stone is warm.

I can hear him now, clearly. Not a voice, but a pulse.

—You kept the matchbook, he says. You knew you'd return.

The candle gutters one final time and dies. The dark is total. And still, I do not rise.

In this silence, I understand. The manuscript was never a summons. It was an ending I had written into the world, left buried under too much breath and theatre.

The fog is not punishment. It is memory taking its final shape.

I close my eyes. And for the first time in years, I remember the name we gave to the one who vanished.

Tom.

Tom.

Tom.

I whisper it into the stone. And the fog—it listens.

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