The sentence that refused to end

 

Experimental Short Story Series #24
Title: "The Sentence that Refused to End"
By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty Member, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, KSA)

The Story:

He sat at the desk, the cursor blinking like a heartbeat. It was supposed to be a simple task—write one clean, evocative sentence for the opening of his new short story. Just one sentence. But as he typed, something peculiar happened.

“The moonlight dripped over the windowsill like spilled milk, but…”

He blinked. But what?

He leaned back, confused. That wasn’t what he meant to say. He tried again.

“The moonlight bled through the blinds like guilt, but the shadows—”

Delete. Type. Re-type. Shift the verbs. Trim the adverbs. Add a semicolon. Change it back to a comma. Every time he tried to complete the sentence, the words rearranged themselves. Sometimes subtly. Sometimes outrageously. They hissed with grammatical defiance. They mutated when he blinked.

One night, frustrated, he shouted aloud, “End the sentence!”

The sentence answered.

It said: “I will end when you understand.”

He froze.

The next morning, he found that his text editor had vanished. In its place was a blank white screen with a single line.

“The writer sat at his desk, imprisoned by the sentence that refused to end…”

He gasped.

He reached for the keyboard to delete it—but his fingers wouldn’t move.

He read on, helpless.

“…and he realized he was merely a character in a sentence, authored by another, edited by time, punctuated by regret, and spell-checked by fate.”

Outside, the sun didn’t rise. Inside, the cursor blinked once, then twice—and vanished.

So did he.

Reflections on the Story:

This piece plays with metafiction, linguistic rebellion, and writerly dread. It blurs the line between creation and creator—an experimental commentary on how writing can consume the writer, and how language sometimes wrests control from its master.

This is a story about the tyranny of syntax and the horror of unfinished thoughts. A literary mirror held up to every writer who ever felt they were not shaping the sentence, but that the sentence was shaping them.

Join the Literary Revolution

This blog is part of our 60 Experimental Short Stories Series, where imagination has no genre, and the rules are written only to be artfully broken. Each story in this unique collection expands the borders of what short fiction can be.

Follow us on farazparvez1.blogspot.com—the digital home for literary innovation. Every post here is more than a blog; it’s a portal.

Watch for the eBook release of this entire series and the upcoming limited-edition hard copy—crafted for readers who believe in stories that challenge, transform, and live on.

Your support, feedback, and readership fuel this literary odyssey. Keep reading. Keep sharing. Keep the sentence alive.

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