Lester Tan had only been at the newspaper for nineteen days when the obituaries editor slid a thin file across his desk and said, “Write this cleanly and quickly. Don’t make the family call to complain.” Lester, who still believed that the world could be organised into neat categories if you chose the right words, nodded calmly and confidently.
He had not yet learned how a curse could affect a life that treated death as something that needed refining. The cursor on his screen blinked once, then paused — not at the end of a sentence, but in the middle of one.
He disliked things that were left unfinished — such as a sentence that trailed off or a story that ended without shape — and had always believed that if something was incomplete, it was because something had gone wrong along the way.
He opened the file for Adrian Leong’s funeral, adjusting the spacing, correcting a date and trimming a sentimental line from a relative’s tribute. Leaning back, he felt a faint, private satisfaction.
“As long as it reads well,” he murmured to himself, tapping his fingers on the desk in time with the words, “that’s enough.” The sentence on his screen lingered for a moment longer than necessary, as if waiting for something that never came.
Assignment of the Dead
The newsroom smelled of the heat from the printers, stale coffee and rain that had been carried in on people’s sleeves. Somewhere behind him, a printer started a job but did not finish it — the paper was fed halfway in before the machine stopped, emitting a soft, uncertain whirr… then silence.
Lester had already grown fond of this rhythm: the hurried voices, the shouted names, and the sense that they were the first to hear about every disaster in the city before anyone else.
He was young, well-dressed and punctilious with punctuation. He was also proud of his ability to take a messy life and compress it into a graceful final paragraph.
“Don’t write too much,” his editor, May, said without looking up. “Families want dignity, not literature.”
Lester smiled. “A little literature helps.”
“It gives it structure,” he added. “Otherwise it just… ends.”
“It only helps you,” May replied. “The dead don’t care.”
He thought about that for a moment, then looked back at Adrian Leong’s file, taking in the black-bordered photograph and the dates beneath it. The whole of a human life is reduced to lines that strangers would glance over during breakfast.
Where Endings Begin
He was not disturbed by that. What unsettled him more was how easily a life could remain uneven unless someone took the time to shape it properly.
By lunchtime, the obituary was almost complete: it had been refined and refined again until it was polished and free of awkwardness. Lester felt the small thrill of improvement and the private vanity of believing that he could make grief more bearable by handling it properly.
Then May called his name again.
“Staff shortage downstairs,” she said. “The police liaison needs someone to document homicide scenes for two weeks. You’ve been seconded. Temporary only.”
Lester blinked. “But I write obituaries.”
‘Now you’ll be helping to record where they begin.’ May smiled.
Just Record
The senior crime photographer met him in the lobby, next to a van that smelt faintly of bleach and wet rubber.
His name was Harun and he had the tired face of a man who no longer expected anything good from the world, only variation.
“Stand where you’re told,” Harun said as they drove. “Write down what you see. You don’t touch anything.”
“I know the procedure.”
Harun gave him a brief glance. “No, you know the paperwork. That’s different.”
At the scene of the crime, the police tape fluttered in the night-time breeze, producing a dry, flapping sound. Beyond it, the alley was full of hard light and shadow. Every puddle reflected red and blue light, though one flickered irregularly; the colour would cut out for a fraction of a second before returning, as if the reflection itself could not hold it.
The officers moved quietly. Nobody laughed. Nobody shouted. A radio crackled briefly, a voice beginning to speak before cutting off mid-word: ‘Unit reporting—’. Static followed. Then nothing. Even grief seemed to know better than to interrupt the proceedings.
The Smallest Thing Taken
The victim lay partly turned towards a wall, one arm bent beneath her, her dark, shining hair spread out on the concrete.
Even before he wrote them down, Lester felt the words begin to arrange themselves in his mind.
Female. Early twenties. Approximate age—
“So young,” he said softly. “What a pity.”
Harun turned. “Hey, don’t say that here.”
Lester raised both hands slightly, looking embarrassed but not sorry, and stepped sideways to get a better angle for his notes. His shoe came down on something soft that yielded without resistance.
He frowned and lifted his foot.
A tiny, dark smear clung to the edge of his sole. Not mud. Not paper. Something fibrous. Wet.
He looked at it for a moment. It did not belong to the ground.
Then he wiped it off on the curb and continued writing. It was nothing. In fact, it made the scene easier to look at.
Misplaced Endings
The first time, he only moved the knife slightly — just enough to photograph the blood beneath it.
The second time, he nudged a chair leg inwards to tidy up the room, making it easier to take in and the details less scattered. The whole thing was less… messy.
The third time, he picked up a child’s broken watch from the floor and placed it closer to the victim’s hand because he felt that this made the image more truthful. Though what he really meant was that it was more complete.
Harun saw him once and caught his wrist.
“What are you doing?”
“Making sense of the frame.”
Harun’s voice dropped. “Nothing here belongs to you. Not the scene, not the story, not the dead.”
Lester pulled away, feeling offended. “I’m not harming anyone.”
Harun stared at him for so long that Lester finally looked away.
That night, in bed, Lester told himself that other people were overly sentimental about bodies and too reverent about accidents. He thought they were reluctant to accept that, as with writing, death was more understandable when it wasn’t so chaotic.
He did not see himself as cruel. He saw it as a correction — a subtle adjustment — small changes that were barely noticeable, but which made the scene read properly.
Editing the obituary for Adrian Leong, he thought, not for the first time, that endings were wasted on those too broken to present them properly.
A loose drain cover outside his apartment window rattled in the wind, making a clinking sound. It never seemed to stop moving.
The First Omission
A week after the reassignment, sounds that did not belong to empty rooms began to emanate from the office after midnight.
Lester would stop typing, and then, from the far end of the newsroom, the sound of another keyboard could be heard for a few seconds: tak-tak-tak. The rhythm faltered once — tak… tak — then resumed as if something had forgotten how to continue before remembering again.
Tak-tak-tak.
Then silence.
He blamed overtime.
He would hear the slight turn of a chair wheel behind him, rrrk, and glance back to find nothing but rows of empty desks and monitors left on standby.
He blamed exhaustion. The chair behind him shifted slightly, as if someone had leaned forward to read his screen.
Lester did not turn around immediately.
When he finally did, the chair was empty — but no longer where it had been.
When Words Refuse the Truth
One night, while finalising a report, he typed: “The victim was found intact near the stairwell landing.”
He sent it to print review, then glanced back at the line ten minutes later.
“The victim was found incomplete near the stairwell landing.”
Lester froze.
He deleted the word and typed it again:
Intact.
He checked after saving.
Incomplete.
The screen flickered, suspended between states for a fraction too long — not fully dimming, not fully bright.
His fingertips were cold.
“Funny,” he whispered, though there was no humour in it. “Very funny.”
May, passing his desk with her bag over one shoulder, paused. “You still here?”
“Did you change this?”
She leaned in, read the line and frowned. “Why would I?”
“It changes to something else.”
“Then you must have typed the wrong word.”
“I didn’t.”
May straightened up. “Go home, Lester. You’re too tired.”
After she left, he stared at the screen until the letters blurred. For the first time, a thought entered his mind not as fear, but as irritation sharpened into unease: that somewhere, something was revising his sentences back into a truth he had refused to record.
What the Body Keeps
The numbness started in his left foot.
It was neither pain nor tingling, nor the hot prickling sensation of poor circulation, but rather a strange, deadened absence, as though part of him had quietly ceased to report back.
When he pressed his thumb into the skin above his ankle, he could feel the pressure, but not properly; as if the message travelled from flesh to mind with pieces missing.
Then came the cuts.
A paper edge sliced his finger. It bled a little, then remained open for days, pale and stubborn, neither becoming infected nor healing.
His shoulders thinned.
His shirts became loose.
At lunchtime, his colleagues asked if he was dieting.
“Too much stress,” he said.
May looked up from her noodles. “You look terrible.”
“Thank you.”
“No, I’m serious.”
He tried to laugh, but the sound that came out was weak. “I’m fine.”
He wasn’t. His hands were weakening, causing buttons to slip through holes too easily. Once, while lifting a kettle, he paused halfway, his arm trembling. He was unable to complete the action for several long seconds, and when he finally did, he did so too quickly, as if the missing part of the movement had been forced to catch up all at once.
What the Mind Cannot Complete
At night, he dreamed of bodies laid out on cold steel tables. Each body was incomplete, missing one tiny detail that no one else noticed: a fingernail, an eye, an ear or a piece of skin. In the dream, when he tried to look closer, the missing pieces shifted slightly out of reach, as if refusing to be fully seen.
And always, in the dream, someone stood behind him, saying in a calm, almost pitying voice, “What is misplaced does not disappear. It merely looks for balance.”
He woke with the words still ringing in his ears, finding that he had bitten the inside of his mouth hard enough to taste blood.
Despite his fatigue, he went into the office the next day, telling himself that routine would steady him and that the structure and familiarity of work would help him to regain his equilibrium.
The newsroom was quieter than usual. Or perhaps it only felt that way.
Loss of Control
He sat down, opened a fresh report and began typing.
‘The victim was discovered at approximately—’ The sentence stopped. Not because he chose to stop. His fingers hovered above the keys, unmoving.
He tried again.
‘The victim was discovered—’
The words appeared. Then they vanished.
One by one.
Backspace.
Backspace.
But he wasn’t touching the keys.
Lester leaned forward slowly, breathing shallowly.
On the screen, the sentence reappeared:
“The victim was—”
Then the last word blinked.
Flickered.
And disappeared.
The cursor remained.
Waiting.
Tick.
Tick.
He tried to speak.
“Hello?”
It came out as:
“Hel—”
The rest did not follow.
For a long moment, Lester did not move. Then, very carefully, he closed the laptop.
This time, he did not tell himself it was nothing.
The Curse Explained
He went to the temple because Harun had looked at his face and said, “This is not a hospital matter,” before scribbling an address on the back of a parking receipt.
The old monk who received him was not dramatic, which frightened Lester more than a dramatic performance would have done.
He asked no questions at first. He merely gestured towards the mat.
‘Shoes off.’
Lester obeyed. The room smelled of ash, tea, and old wood, impregnated with years of prayers. Outside, the wind rustled the leaves in the courtyard.
The monk crouched down and examined the sole of Lester’s right shoe. Then, using a thin brass tool, he scraped along the groove in the sole until a dark flake came loose.
Tiny. Dry. Almost nothing.
The monk held it in his palm but did not touch it again.
“What is that?” Lester asked.
The monk looked at him. “Human remains.”
Lester laughed once, sharply. “That’s impossible.”
“No.”
What Has Been Taken
The monk’s voice remained quiet. “The dead must remain whole. Even the smallest part of them belongs to them: Hair, skin, ash, blood. You stepped on something that should have been returned.”
Lester felt the air thin around him. “Then I’ll return it.”
The monk’s eyes did not leave his face. ‘You cannot return what was never given.’
“Why not?”
“It did not leave. It was taken.” The monk said.
‘That is where your ending began to break.’
Lester swallowed. “So I’m being haunted?”
“No.” The monk closed his hand over the fragment. ‘If it were a haunting, it could follow you.’
“This does not.”
“It subtracts.”
“Not everything that is taken is meant to return.”
He spoke the next words slowly, as if he had to place each one carefully.
“What is broken like this cannot be made whole again.”
“What is missing will be taken from you.”
“Not all at once.”
Remedy Without Completion
Even before it had truly begun, the ritual failed.
The monk burned folded paper charms and mixed the ash into water. He circled Lester three times, reciting sutras so quietly that they seemed breathed rather than spoken. For a brief moment, Lester thought that the room had grown lighter.
Then the candle nearest to him flickered out.
Not out. Just bent.
Its flame narrowed into a trembling thread and made a tiny hissing sound.
The monk stopped.
“Is that all?” Lester asked. “Why are you stopping?”
“It does not recognize correction.”
“There must be something else. There has to be something else.”
The monk turned towards the altar, not in dismissal but in resignation. ‘If a spirit clings, it can be guided. If a doorway is opened, it can be shut. But this—” He touched two fingers to the floor.
“This is not something that can be undone. It has already chosen its direction. It is not trying to enter you. It is removing what should never have been taken away.”
Lester stood up too quickly and swayed.
“So I will just die?”
The monk answered with terrible honesty. “You will be reduced. In the same way.”
On his way out, Lester heard the monk call after him once more.
“Do not begin anything you cannot carry to its end.”
Lester turned around, his voice tightening. “I can’t even finish a sentence.”
The monk’s gaze did not change.
“Yes.”
There was a pause.
“That is how it begins.”
The Weight of Missing Things
Three days later, he stopped going to work.
By that time, his cheeks had become so sunken that he could barely recognise himself in the bathroom mirror. His collarbone stood out sharply, as if trying to climb out of his skin. He ate, but the food sat inside him like a memory, rather than providing nourishment. He slept, but woke up feeling more exhausted than before. He drank water, but felt none of it remain.
May called. He let it ring.
Harun texted once: “Open the door if I come.”
Lester did not answer that either.
His apartment was filled with unfinished drafts. The obituary for Adrian Leong remained open on his laptop, almost complete, with the final paragraph having been revised twelve times and still not quite right. Two crime reports were half-written. A message to his mother contained only the words “I’m not feeling—”.
When Things Refuse to Complete
At dusk, the rooms changed.
Drawers stopped closing all the way. Even when he pushed them shut, they would open slightly again — never enough to be obvious, but never fully closing either.
The front door needed two attempts to close, as the latch would not catch on the first try.
The bathroom tap produced only intermittent bursts of water — khh, khh, ssh — as though even the water had forgotten how to flow uninterrupted. It hovered at the edge of becoming whole, then fell apart again.
One night, Lester sat on the floor because standing required too much certainty and listened to the building breathe around him.
The refrigerator hummed, then cut out.
A neighbour’s television rose through the wall in fragments.
A child in the corridor laughed, but did not finish.
His own breath had begun to break strangely at the end of each inhale.
Not pain.
Absence.
Not terror.
Recognition.
With a clarity that made him shiver, he thought that the curse was not bringing him closer to death. Rather, it was teaching his body to stay unfinished until its arrival.
Final Night — The Incomplete Ending
The final night came without storm or visible omen, though he could see them.
Lester sat at his desk, wrapped in a blanket despite the warm air, looking at Adrian Leong’s obituary on the screen. He had meant to submit it days ago. The cursor blinked patiently after the final sentence, tick… tick… tick.
He typed: He is survived by—
He stopped.
Typed again.
Deleted.
His fingers refused to complete the line.
He stood up to reach for his phone and nearly collapsed, catching himself on the edge of the desk in an awkward position, his body held between standing and falling. The room blurred. Somewhere in the apartment, a cupboard door tapped softly: tok… tok… tok.
“Help,” he tried to say.
It came out as “He—”
Nothing followed.
His lungs seized halfway through the next breath. Not choking. Not suffocation. It was simply an action abandoned before it could become whole.
He thought of Harun saying, “Nothing here belongs to you.”
He thought of the monk’s brass tool scraping his shoe.
He thought of the young woman in the alley and the tiny softness beneath his heel.
On the laptop screen, words began to appear, even though his hands were no longer on the keys.
Lester stared, his eyes burning, and dragged himself towards the phone, one elbow then the other; his movement reduced to broken attempts. His mouth opened.
“I am going—”
The sentence did not complete.
Discovery — A Body That Never Completed
When morning came, he was found slumped against the side of the desk. One arm was extended towards the fallen phone and his body was curved in a way that suggested he had been interrupted rather than died.
There was no fear in his expression.
Only confusion.
Harun arrived with the ambulance crew after May finally used the spare key that the landlord kept. The paramedic checked for a pulse and pupil dilation, the simple signs that confirm life or death.
“Time of death?” someone asked.
The paramedic exhaled softly. “Unknown. Cause unclear.”
Harun’s gaze shifted to the laptop, still glowing on the desk.
There, ready for publication, was Adrian Leong’s obituary, neatly formatted and complete.
Beneath the staff credit, in the line that no reader would ever see, the byline remained unchanged:
Prepared by Lester Tan.
The newspaper printed a death notice for Lester two days later. It was elegantly composed, restrained and clean — everything he would have admired — a polished account of a life reduced to something that could be completed. It said he had been diligent, thoughtful and well-respected by his colleagues. It said he had passed peacefully at home.
No one reading it over breakfast would have guessed how violently incompletion had hollowed him out; how each motion, word, breath and thought had been taken from him, piece by piece, until the curse permitted one thing only: completion.
For the first time in his life, Lester Tan had reached a complete ending.
It was not his to finish.
On another desk, in another file, an unfinished sentence waited.
Related Story
Adrian Leong’s death was not the beginning of the imbalance—it was only one of the things left in its wake.
At his funeral, someone took something from the dead. And something accepted it.
