Bradbury 1

1 – The Last Rejection

Liam Carter had lost count of how many rejections he had received, but this one hurt just as much as the first.

He sat hunched over his laptop in the dim glow of his studio apartment, the email glaring back at him.

"Dear Mr. Carter,

Thank you for your submission. While we appreciate the opportunity to review your work, we regret to inform you that your story does not meet our current needs."

It didn’t matter what the rest said. He knew how it ended.

Liam exhaled through his nose and closed his laptop with more force than necessary. The hinge made a strained noise. He let his head fall back against the cheap wooden chair and stared at the ceiling, waiting for the disappointment to fade. It didn’t.

The room around him was a graveyard of unfinished stories. Manuscripts stacked on the floor, notebooks filled with ideas that never became more than a paragraph, a corkboard cluttered with rejection slips that once fueled his determination. Now, they felt like tombstones.

His dream of being a writer had started when he was twelve, when he first picked up an old copy of Fahrenheit 451. The way Bradbury wove words together had felt like magic, and Liam wanted that kind of magic for himself.

But at thirty-five, with nothing to show for his years of effort except unopened bills and mounting self-doubt, he wondered if he had been lying to himself all along.

Maybe some people weren’t meant to succeed.

Outside, the city pulsed with life. The muffled honking of cars, the chatter of strangers on sidewalks, the distant wail of a siren—it was a reminder that the world didn’t care whether he made it or not.

Liam sighed, grabbed his coat, and left the apartment. He had no destination, only the need to escape.

2 – The Forgotten Notebook

The subway station smelled of damp concrete and old electricity. It was nearly empty at this hour, except for a few stragglers—night-shift workers, a couple wrapped in whispered conversation, a man slumped against the wall, lost in his own world.

Liam stepped onto the train and took a seat near the back.

He rubbed his hands together, trying to shake the feeling that his life was slipping through his fingers.

Then he saw it.

A notebook, sitting alone on the seat beside him.

It was out of place. Too pristine, too elegant to be in a grimy subway. Its leather cover looked smooth, untouched actually, and the pages inside shimmered faintly under the fluorescent lights.

Liam hesitated before picking it up. He expected someone to claim it, but no one did.

It felt warm in his hands.

Curious, he flipped it open. The first page was blank except for a single sentence, written in an elegant, almost beautiful script:

"What is written here shall be."

A strange chill crawled up his spine. He turned to the next page. Empty.

Pulling a pen from his coat pocket, he hesitated. Then, as a joke, he scrawled:

"Liam wakes up to find his rent mysteriously paid."

The ink shimmered for a moment before settling into the page.

The train lurched to a stop. Liam, shaking his head at his own foolishness, slipped the notebook into his bag and stepped onto the platform.

3 – An Impossible Coincidence

The next morning, Liam was jolted awake by a sharp knock at his door.

He groggily pulled on a sweatshirt and opened it to find Mrs. Mendoza, his landlord, standing there with a puzzled expression.

“Good news,” she said, holding up a printed receipt. “Your rent’s been covered. Turns out there was a clerical error in the system. You don’t owe anything this month.”

Liam blinked at her.

“What?”

Mrs. Mendoza sighed. “Look, I don’t know what happened, but it’s in your favor, so just take the win.”

She turned and walked away, leaving Liam frozen in the doorway.

He stared down at the receipt. Balance: $0.00.

The notebook.

He rushed to his desk, flipping through its pages. The sentence he had written was still there, the ink now dried.

It couldn’t be real. Could it?

4 – Testing the Limits

Over the next week, Liam experimented.

"The coffee shop on 8th Street gives Liam a free drink today."

That afternoon, a barista grinned at him. “Congrats! You’re our hundredth customer. This one’s on the house.”

"Liam finds twenty dollars on the sidewalk."

The next morning, he nearly tripped over a crumpled bill near his apartment building.

"An old friend from college messages him out of the blue."

That night, his phone buzzed with a message. Hey, man, been ages! How’ve you been?

His heart pounded.

It wasn’t coincidence.

It was real.

But there were limits.

Liam tried writing, "A million dollars appears in my bank account." Nothing happened.

"Liam wins the lottery." His ticket was worthless.

The notebook wasn’t granting miracles. It was making possible things happen.

That’s when a dangerous thought took root.

What if he wrote something bigger?

5 – The Man in the Coat

Liam sat at his desk, pen hovering over the notebook.

After a long hesitation, he wrote:

"Tomorrow, I will meet the person who left me this notebook."

At precisely midnight, someone knocked on his door.

Liam’s stomach twisted.

The knock came again.

Slow. Deliberate.

He swallowed hard, then opened the door.

A man in a dark coat stood in the hallway. His face was shadowed, his expression unreadable.

“You shouldn’t have written that,” the man said.

Liam’s throat went dry. “Who are you?”

The man stepped inside without invitation, shutting the door behind him. “The last owner of that notebook.”

Liam backed up. “What is it?”

The man’s gaze was sharp, almost pitying.

“A gift,” he said. “A curse. A story that writes you back.”

Liam’s fingers curled into fists. “What do you mean?”

The man sighed and pulled something from his coat—a folded newspaper. He slid it across the table.

Liam hesitated before unfolding it. His blood ran cold.

The headline read: Struggling Writer Loses Everything in Bizarre Bank Error

The article detailed how another writer, one eerily similar to Liam, had all his money erased overnight due to a “clerical mistake.”

Liam’s breath hitched.

“The notebook doesn’t create,” the man said. “It rearranges.”

Liam looked up, his skin crawling. “What happens if I stop writing?”

The man exhaled.

“That’s up to the book.”

6 – The Final Sentence

Liam tried to stop.

But the more he resisted, the more things went wrong.

His laptop crashed, deleting months of work. His boss fired him without warning. His bank account was mysteriously emptied.

The notebook was punishing him.

So he gave in.

He wrote himself into literary fame; best-selling books, interviews, success.

But then he saw another article.

Another writer had vanished, her books erased from existence.

Liam realized the truth.

For him to rise, others had to fall.

He grabbed the pen with shaking hands and wrote:

"The notebook no longer exists."

The ink shimmered.

The book trembled.

Then just like that, it was gone.

Far away, in another city, another struggling writer sat on a train, staring at a strange leather-bound book on the seat beside them.

They reached for it.

And the story began again.