The Library of Unwritten Endings

In the desert town of Ashveil, time didn’t pass—it pooled. The sun hung motionless, bleaching the adobe buildings into bone-white ghosts, and the library at the town’s edge grew thicker each day, its shelves sprouting books no one had authored. The townsfolk called them echo-volumes: blank pages that filled themselves with the stories you’d abandoned mid-sentence.

Levi returned after a decade, his sister’s journal tucked under his arm. Mara had vanished into the dunes years ago, leaving behind only this: sketches of wind-scarred mesas and a single entry—“I tried to write us a better ending. The sand ate the words.” The journal’s spine crackled like static when he opened it.

The librarian, a woman with dust for hair and a name tag reading CALLIOPE, greeted him by sliding a book across the counter. Its title: THE BOY WHO BUILT FIRES TO WARD OFF THE DARK. Levi’s throat tightened. He’d burned their childhood fort the night Mara left.

“Echo-volumes don’t lie,” Calliope said. “They just… remember.”

The library’s aisles yawned into infinity. Levi’s footsteps echoed like dropped coins as he traced the shelves:

A.A.1: HOW TO HOLD A GHOST WITHOUT CRUSHING IT (Illustrated with his hands cradling ashes.)

B.Z.9: FIFTEEN WAYS TO SAY “I’M SORRY” IN A DEAD LANGUAGE (Margin notes in Mara’s jagged script.)

X.Q.3: THE WEIGHT OF ALMOST (Blank, but the cover warmed like skin.)

When Levi slept between the stacks, the books whispered. “You blamed her for leaving,” hissed Volume M.7, “but you were the one who lit the match.”

Calliope found him clawing at a book titled WHAT THE SAND KEPT. Inside: a pressed juniper branch (Mara’s hair had smelled like this), a ticket stub to a bus she never boarded, and a sentence that hadn’t existed before: “Levi, I stayed as long as I could.”

“She’s here,” Levi rasped.

“No,” Calliope said. “But the library is. It holds what you refuse to.”

Levi climbed the roof at dawn, the journal trembling in his grip. The desert stretched like a fresh bandage, and the books below rustled in a language of grit and regret. He tore out Mara’s sketches, folded them into swallows, and let the wind take them.

The first page of THE BOY WHO BUILT FIRES began to smolder. Levi didn’t stop it.

Ashveil’s library stands quieter now. Calliope reshelves the echo-volumes, their spines sighing as they settle. Levi tends the rooftop garden, where juniper sprouts between cracks in the clay. Some nights, he swears the dunes sing Mara’s name—not in grief, but in the key of almost.

He never writes. But he listens.