Ways to End a Short Story
&
Has This Ever Happened to You
Sophie Hoss
Sophie Hoss loves the ocean and is in bed by 9 pm every night. She has received a Pushcart Prize, and her words are scattered around in BOMB, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review, The Southampton Review, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. Also, she has a small dog named Elmo who likes to wear little sweaters. You can read more of her work at sophiehosswriting.com.
Ways to End a Short Story
Someone begins to pray.
Someone vows to never pray again.
An animal slinks away unseen.
Everything is an eternal moment. The writer smudges the boundaries between present and future with the pad of their thumb. The character’s face smears; they could be anyone.
Flashback feat. poignant dialogue from a character who has not spoken yet.
An animal displays astounding wisdom.
Flashback that recontextualizes a character’s passion for collecting bottle caps.
Memory tsunami.
The search for meaning is abandoned in favor of gardening.
Someone dies for real this time.
Someone is reborn in the metaphorical sense.
A lost object is (a) found
(b) lost
(c) eaten
Description of stars/planets/moon(s).
A character’s cold, distant father really did love them deep down. It’s proven in this postcard he sent to an old school friend, bragging about the character’s achievements in science class. Happy now?
Visit from a personification of The Great Unknown.
An unrequited love sails over the horizon and into the stars.
One question is answered; another lingers. Take your pick.
Something ordinary suddenly appears strikingly beautiful.
A character decides they’re finally ready to embrace parenthood. Their children are delighted to hear this.
Familiar music plays from somewhere in the distance. Fade to black.
The kindly, middle-aged therapist smiles and adjusts her glasses.
“Excellent work today,” she says. “Same time next week?”
The sun rises and/or sets.
Meaningful eye contact with a stranger.
The apocalypse carries on as usual, but we all understand each other a little better.
Another fissure appears in the corroded suburban marriage. Divorce seems more impossible than ever.
The AI overlords turn out to be more merciful than humans.
A character does not wake up and realize it was all a dream. They thought this was a dream, but it’s all been real.
Someone gives in to their darkest impulses. Holding the severed head isn’t as satisfying as they’d hoped it would be.
A character bites hedonistically into a piece of fruit.
Ouroboros.
Rewind.
Fast forward.
A character tries to sleep but cannot. They watch the shadows seep across their ceiling like inkblots. An old fear presses at them, but they push it away. We don’t have enough time to unpack everything.
Someone drives away and doesn’t look back.
Okay, fine.
Maybe they look back just a little.
A character closes a door and God opens a window.
It begins to snow and/or rain. It feels like forgiveness, but that might be wishful thinking.
Has This Ever Happened to You
I once swallowed a pack of nails, and the next day stigmata wounds opened in my palms and ankles. I’d been impaled from the inside out. People couldn’t figure out if it was a miracle or a freak accident. They eventually settled on miracle and started bringing me lots of presents. They also brought requests. A tearful old woman laid her sickly cat at my feet and begged me to heal it.
“He rescued me from the bottom of a well when I was a little girl,” she said. “Do you know how dark it was down there?”
I took the cat in my arms and let it lick my bleeding hands. It seemed to perk up quite a bit. Turned out it just had an iron deficiency.
A few weeks in, I realized that I wasn’t very excellent at being a miracle. The pressure was getting to me. I found a support group for stigmata wound sufferers, and there was just enough room for me to join. They met on Wednesday evenings at the library.
“You know the worst part?” said one of the group members. “All the goddamn laundry.”
We murmured in agreement. I bandaged my hands and ankles every night so the blood wouldn’t stain my white sheets, but these efforts were always in vain.
“Someone’s painting a mural of me on the side of a laundromat,” complained another group member. “He thinks I’m the reason his houseplants stopped dying.”
“That’s not so bad,” said another. “Missionaries keep showing up at my house and asking me to be their mascot. I don’t even know how they got my address.”
“Let’s not compare our struggles,” the group moderator said gently. He was not a stigmata sufferer himself, but he was once briefly turned into a pillar of salt, so he was able to empathize with our plight.
“Do any of you have the slit?” someone in the back of the room asked.
“The slit?” We didn’t know what this meant.
He lifted his shirt a little and touched the side of his rib cage. There was a long, shallow cut. “I looked it up. It’s supposed to be the stab wound that the Roman soldiers made.”
We all lined up to come get a closer look. It was very exciting. I asked him if I could touch it, and he sighed and said fine. He looked a little disappointed to find that even among people like us, he was extraordinary.
There came an afternoon when I realized that my left palm had scabbed over. I debated scratching it back open, but I figured that all miracles had to run their course, and if my lap was ending, there was nothing much to do about it. I called the support group moderator and asked if I was still allowed to come to meetings.
“Of course,” he said. “You don’t just stop being a miracle.”
It was a nice thing to say. He may have even been right, but when my scab began to bleed again and my body flooded with relief, I knew I hadn’t believed him even a little.