“Bet you didn’t expect to see this one again!”
Just like a bad ex-lover with an open schedule, I just can’t seem to stay away from writing terrible inner monologue stories that take up way too much space and seem to go nowhere at a glacier’s pace. But I’m still getting back into the groove of writing stories that take up a reasonable amount of time, so here we are once again. Like any good scientist, I’m modeling alternatives and variables and hypothesizing other possible outcomes for my stories, so this week is a demo for a happy ending to the very unhappy story of “Periphery.” I did promise that Daniel would go see the horses or something, didn’t I?
I am proud/appeasing my mother/relieved to say that this week’s content warning is for material that is not nearly as grotesque or violent as the “proper” ending to “Periphery.” Mind you, it’s still upsetting. Just not in a split-open-your-own-skull kind of way. So I think it’s important to drop this content warning right before the story actually starts.
Content Warning: Discussions of Self-Harm
See, I don’t know if this new ending is one that would actually replace the ending I had initially imagined for “Periphery.” It’s kind of sappy, and tacky, and a little cliche, and doesn’t really mesh with the vibe of the rest of the story at all. But I got the idea after writing the cafe scene between Dan and Stephanie, when I realized that there was an opportunity there for Dan to do something and not just give in to the mental illness. So I wanted to give it a shot and see where the story went with it. And it went to about the place I pretty much expected it to go to, though I have to say that I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I might rework this into the end of a totally different story. Maybe an alternate universe kind of thing, a parallel story to “Periphery,” where instead of being scared of the eldritch abomination that’s parasitized his brain, he’s scared of horses. What a change that would be to the story.
Or maybe not. I think there’s something here, but I don’t know if it’s anything meaningful enough to work around yet. I probably just have to give it some more time, and compare the two endings side by side whenever I eventually go over this story for its second draft. I think that writing out extra stuff like this is a good exercise in learning your story and your characters, and I don’t feel like this was wasted time, even if I do end up pitching the whole thing. Writing all of this was good practice, and got me at least a little bit out of the rut I had been in for ages. I just need to work a little harder to make something that’s actually publishable. You know, by professional standards.
Anyway, here’s an alternate ending to “Periphery!” It picks up in the beginning/middle-ish of Part Four, and nothing else has changed in the story up to the point where the italics stop. So for this, we’re picking up near the middle of the cafe scene, and it’s from the end of there that changes. After the italics is where the new stuff starts. Let me know down in the comments which ending you prefer!
“Periphery – Alternate Ending,” by Andy Sima (2022)
“I don’t know,” I said. Try opening up. “It felt so real. And it really reminded me of my childhood, I guess? I, uh, I used to see these things when I was little, these orbs that would float over my bed as a kid, and they always scared the shit out of me, but I wasn’t scared of this one, I guess?”
Stephanie leaned back in her chair, and made the same sort of disconcerting silence my mother had when I first lied told her. I knew that look. That was the look that people made when they caught me counting buttons on my shirt. Or the look my first couple doctors gave me when I told them about how I couldn’t stop counting the buttons. Or the look that you give someone who’s just told you they have a contagious illness. Onetwothreefour Great, I’ve ruined any chance I have of being her friend, of being an officer in the club, of getting close to someone around this goddamned place, now I was going to have to ask her if things were ok, and I was going to blubber and blunder my way around until I said something even worse onetwothreefour and she’d hate me forever onetwothreefour and
“I get that, dude,” she said. Wait, what? “My, uh, sister had auditory hallucinations as a kid. I’m not saying that’s what you’ve got. But she’d hear people calling her name from the other room, and there’d be no one there. Freaked us all to hell and back. But she got… better. I believe everyone can get better.” My hands paused.
“I don’t know, I just feel really under a lot of pressure right,” I said. “It’s like I’ve got all this stuff to do, but the problem is I create so much of it for myself, and I can’t seem to ever cut through it, and I just keep doing more and more and it just keeps piling up, and one little thing will set me off and I’ll spiral for hours and waste a whole day, and…” I felt my heart rate creeping up again. My fingers clenched and unclenched.
“Sometimes you just gotta call some days a wash, you know?” She said. “Hell, I’ve lost whole weeks before, know what I’m saying?” She said. “If yesterday was a wash and you had to skip a meeting to feel ok, that’s ok. I just want to make sure that you’ve got the space to do that.”
“Why me?” I asked. What a stupid fucking question to ask, why me. Like I’m some sort of poor stupid dog in a storm drain, why me. What makes me so special or so pitiable that I need some sort of help? What the hell am I saying? Onetwothreefour No. I need to be better than this. I can’t let myself do this. I’m close to something here. A fog around my head was starting to clear. Don’t dig back into this. Try harder. Try harder. Try harder. You aren’t trying hard enough.
She shrugged. “I mean, I’ve known you for, like, a year now? I think that’s enough time to get you some coffee and talk about how shit life can be, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said, and half-smiled. I looked at her. I felt like I was holding back tears. But they were good tears. Right? But I couldn’t cry in front of her. Normal people didn’t cry about this stuff. I couldn’t cry in a coffee shop. Could I? Who was going to tell me I couldn’t? Was I going to tell myself that? But she’d hate me if I cried. That would be so awkward. I wouldn’t look like officer material.
“But it’s not really enough,” said a third voice. A pale face with details I couldn’t quite make out began to slide out from behind Stephanie’s head. It looked like it was upside down, with the eyes at the bottom and the mouth at the top, but it had no neck, no ears, no hair, no nose, nothing besides deep, sunken red eyes, high, emaciated cheek bones, and a tiny, sucking mouth. It looked like me.
I started to breathe heavier, fingers grasping at my shirt. Onetwothreefour onetwothreefour what the hell was that and why was it just floating there, why couldn’t it go away and just leave me alone “Woah, dude, are you okay?” what the hell is wrong with me there’s something wrong with me and I’ll never be right why can’t I get red of it I’ve wasted so much time already what the hell wait no I’m ok I have to be ok “Yeah, I’m good” onetwothreefour onetwothreefour “You look really pale, dude,” onetwothree onetwothree onetwothree WHY ARE THERE ONLY THREE WAIT WHAT ONETWOTHREEONETWOTHREEONETWOTHREE
I looked down at my shirt, and I couldn’t find the fourth button. I couldn’t find the fourth button. Oh god. I couldn’t find the fourth button.
I started to hyperventilate, breathing heavy and fast, almost choking on the air as I sucked it in and out through teeth that clenched and a jaw that knotted and a face that twisted and contorted until I was holding back tears and the left corner of my mouth drooped and grimaced and you’re losing it you stupid bastard oh god this was so embarrassing I’m such a mess I could never come back here again and I think I caught some of my lip between my teeth because I could taste blood now, blood the color of red of the color of a mass hanging in space between the stars you’re such a joke and my eyes screwed tight and spiraled and I saw stars in the back of my eyelids and the kept getting closer and closer and
Then a smaller voice. An indistinct voice. Don’t pull away now. You’re so close. Maybe it was my mother. Maybe it was one of my therapists, the ones that hadn’t tried to force their religion or ass-backwards morality on me. Maybe it was Stephanie herself. I couldn’t quite tell just then. It was warm, and didn’t come from the hot, angry place right at the back of my eyes that always seemed to yell and pulse and chastise, but from the deeper part of my brain, the part that was dominated by a vast expanse of foggy, lurid marshland that always seemed to come to me just before I fell asleep. It was peaceful.
“Woah, dude, are you ok?” Stephanie said. “No, I’m sorry, that’s a stupid question. In this moment, how can I help you?
I paused. I unscrewed my eyes, and slowed my breathing just enough to think. I shivered. My lungs ached and my chest was a rose bush set aflame. Get out of here. You’re no good to her. I looked up at her, and met her eyes, and really saw them, and saw not pity or awkwardness or fear but something kind. Compassionate. I slowed my hands, which had been rapidly counting the buttons on my shirt without realizing it, and dropped both of my palms to the table. Leave. Just go. Be alone. I wanted to use that voice I knew so badly, the one that I had learned to get out of situations like this and run away. But that smaller voice, the one from the dreamy, pre-sleep part of my brain, pushed again. And I echoed to Stephanie what it told me to say.
“I’m not ok. I’m sorry I’m putting you through this.” Here I looked down at my hands on the table, where my skin felt like it wanted to peel itself apart and crawl away until I was left with nothing but muscle and tendon and bone. “I think I need to go home.”
She stood up, rapidly, and offered her hand for me to stand up, too. “Do you want me to drive you home?” she asked.
“No, I think I’m ok,” I said. And then I paused. The little voice said something else. “Actually… I’m really sorry. Would you… Do you have a little bit of time? To just… sit, or something?”
Her smile was small and warm, not her usual cockeyed grin, and her eyes were smooth and kind. You don’t deserve her help. God, why did I even ask? I don’t deserve this, she must have so much else going on, she must be so busy, why would she take the time out of her day to help me, I barely know her, why am I suddenly her responsibility, that’s just great, me depending upon the assistance of another woman to pull me along, and I was just going to up and go with it, because I’m a useless coward a useless coward and I can’t do anything for yourself can’t do anything for myself and then she said
“Come on. Let me show you something.”
She beckoned me to follow her. I’d never realized how tall she was before. But that wasn’t right, she barely passed the podium at meetings, it seemed. And yet now, she seemed to reach the ceiling of the café as I grabbed my backpack and walked out to the street parking behind the building, where she unlocked the door of an old red pickup truck. The wheel wells were rusted and the windows were controlled by wind-up handles.
She must have noticed the odd expression on my face. “You look surprised. What, did you think I’d be driving a Subaru?” Her grin was back now. Wait, what do Subarus have to do with- She lightly punched me on the arm. “I’m just messing with you, dude.”
“I didn’t know you had a car on campus,” I said.
“Well, we’ve got to get people to camping this weekend somehow, am I right?” she said.
My hands skittered about like spiders on a string as they onetwothreefour counted out the buttons of my shirt. There were now four once again, which helped to calm me down to at least passable levels. You shouldn’t even be getting in that car I opened up the passenger door to the car and pulled myself up, accidentally kicking an empty bag of chips and crushing the remaining pieces as I settled in.
“Shit, sorry for the mess,” she said, swinging herself up onto her seat, and she slammed the driver’s side door and put the car into gear. The engine sputtered as her foot found the clutch. “I didn’t think I’d be having guests until Friday.” There was an awkward pause, say something you idiot but I didn’t have anything to say, and she added, hurriedly, “Not that I have a problem with you being here.” She turned to me. “I’m serious. Dead. Serious.” Her eyes flashed and her nose ring fogged with heavy breath. And then she laughed and backed the car out of the parking lot.
“Where are we going?” I asked. She turned down the street that marked the edge of campus and the beginning of where the townies lived. Eventually, the street would lead out of town entirely.
“You’ll see,” she said. “I found out about this my freshman year, and I’ve been going there every time I need a break.”
The pickup truck chugged along the road, passing the dorms, the parking garages, the campus museum, the arts department, the dining halls, the track fields, and eventually the arboretum and the community soccer fields until we were on the very edges of campus, out where the corn began to grow in earnest and you could almost forget there was a school there at all. She turned down a side road, passed a sign that said “College of Veterinary Medicine”, and powered the truck up a shallow hill until we reached a white barn. The barn was strange and rounded, like an observatory, and for a split second my heart started to race as I thought about the astronomy homework I had to catch up on and the telescopes and the sound of shattered glass and my childhood was back inside my head all at once, and those dancing lights were back, and then the car stopped and she opened the door at got out.
“You comin’, dude?” she called to me. I blinked once, counted ontwothreefour the buttons on my shirt, and hopped to the ground from the pickup truck. I made my way over to the fence we had parked next to.
It was a tall fence, probably eight feet high, with flat boards at regular intervals that clearly weren’t meant to keep out anything smaller than a person. There was a sign off to one side that said “LIVE ANIMALS – EXERCISE CAUTION” followed by the symbol for the vet med college and another sign that had clearly been tacked on at a much later time which read “Please Do Not Feed The Horses.”
Stephanie was leaning on one of the slats in the fence, arms hanging through to the other side. I stood next to her, looking from her to the fence to the sign to the empty field on the other side, and then to the horse which seemed to materialize out of thin air just beyond the fence. I jumped big baby and took a step back. I’d never particularly liked horses, especially when they phased into existence without my notice.
Stephanie laughed at you she’s laughing at you because she hates you but it wasn’t a malicious laughter, it was friendly. She pulled a handful of baby carrots out of her pocket. “I grabbed them from my truck. I promise I haven’t been carrying around carrots all day like some kind of weirdo,” she added, answering my question.
She held the carrots up to the horse, her palm flat in offering, not in fearful offering to a god or a demon as you would do you wimp but in offering tea to someone you haven’t seen in many months. The horse’s enormous lips parted to reveal tall, stained teeth, like someone had stretched and distorted an image of what regular teeth should look like and then slapped it back on the real thing, but Stephanie did not pull away. She giggled as the horse’s lips vacuumed up the carrots from her hand. Like it tickled or something.
“What…” I started to say, but realized I didn’t really onetwothreefour have any question. I just needed to say something to break out of the weird onetwothreefour shock that this caught me in. It didn’t seem all that strange, really. And yet I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it.
“Whenever I get too stressed out, I come here and feed the horses,” she said. “They help calm me down.” She pointed to the sign telling us not to feed the animals. “I like to think that’s my handiwork,” she said, and flipped off the sign. I smiled. For what felt like the first time in three days. Or maybe three weeks. It might have been longer.
“Don’t they… scare you?” I asked.
“Oh, no, they’re just big babies, aren’t they?” she said, in the voice one would use to talk to an especially fat dog. “Aren’t you just a big baby?” She said again, and reached a hand up to scratch the horse behind its hear. The massive animal huffed in response, and lowered its head to her. “You want to give her a scritch?” Absolutely not.
“I’ll pass, thanks,” I said. Onetwothreefour there was something about massive creatures that always made me deeply uncomfortable, things that could onetwothreefour crush me as easily as they could walk or think or dream or hang in the space between spaces or onetwothreefour anything like that and horses were high among that list of things. Just being near them made me jittery. My skin felt electric.
“Sure thing, dude,” she said. “That just means more scritches for me, huh,” she said, using the fat dog voice again. As tense as the thing made me, there was that ‘and yet…’ hanging out in the back of my head.
I tentatively leaned my arms on the fence, too, mimicking Stephanie’s nonchalant approach as the horse threw itself head back and wandered off towards the middle of the field. We stood there, watching it as it trotted away, silhouetted against the afternoon sun. There was something onetwothreefour almost peaceful about it all. Right? Could I let myself feel that way? Can you?
The fall wind blew across the field, carrying with it the smell of horses and beyond that the vet med building and beyond that the small herd of cows the agriculture students used as training and beyond that the endless fields of corn that surrounded us on all sides, oceans unto ourselves. I watched another horse join the first one, and they trotted next to each other at the far end of the field.
“My sister… She, uh, she was tough to get along with,” Stephanie said. “She was creepy and weird and neurotic and so friggin’ mean most of the time. I hated her guts. I hated her guts’s guts. I hated her for so long. I think we all did, a little bit.” She sighed, heavy, and kept her eyes fixed on the horses. “We knew she was sick. We knew it wasn’t her fault, not really. But I still hated her.”
“And then, one day, we found her… well, are you ok if I talk about this, dude? You probably know where this is going,” she said, turning to look at me. Her eyes weren’t warm anymore, not in the same way. And although they were focused on me, they were somewhere far away, too.
“Uh, sure,” I said. Why me? Why you?
“Ok.” There was a pause again. The wind blew. “One, uh, one day, my dad found her in the bathtub, arms all cut to hell, and she was crying and talking to someone none of us could see. Nothing life-threatening, thank God, the dumb bitch was too stupid to cut the right way, but, uh,” a breath in, a breath out, “we took her to the hospital anyway.”
“We, uh, we all kind of changed after that. I don’t think we really took her seriously before. We didn’t know. And, God, I cried that night. Even though I hated her, I couldn’t imagine a world without my sister in it. It took me a long time to wrestle with that. Hell, I’m still wrestling with it.”
The silver ring in her nose fogged up once, twice, three times before she kept speaking. “I think… well. She’d been seeing doctors from the time she could walk, but we didn’t really help her until after that. My parents had tried, earlier, and then they got tired. We all did. But to think about losing her… Well, we all tried a little harder. I don’t know if it helped. But she eventually got a combo of meds that worked, and she thanked us. She thanked me. And I didn’t understand why, for a long time. I didn’t deserve it. But I’m trying to deserve it. You know what I mean?”
There was an awkward pause. I thought for a moment. Is this what it felt like to be on the other side of the opening up? It was… weird. And warm. And my face was kind of wet, and it smelled like livestock. My fingers moved to my buttons, but I didn’t really count them.
“Do you want a hug?” I asked. You moron, of course she doesn’t want
Stephanie laughed, a throaty, choaked out sound. “Yeah,” she said. I moved over to her, and stiffly wrapped my arms around her, and patted her twice on the back. Briefly, she buried her head in my shoulder. My shirt collar felt wet. And then she pulled backwards, sniffled, and wiped her face.
“Dude, you hug like a robot,” she said, laughing and plastering her trademarked sideways grin across her face. I smiled, too.
“Physical contact is new to me,” I said. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. But true.
“I gotta get you a boyfriend or something,” she shook her head. She smiled at me, and I felt something like get out of here peace. Then her gaze shot up over my shoulder, to something past me, and she smile got wider. “Oh, shit, dude, it’s that boy,” she said, and started to reach in her pockets.
“What boy, I don’t-” and I turned around, and there was the biggest fucking horse I had ever seen on the other side of the fence. I jumped back onetwothreefour and you are such a coward! You’re useless! And my heart started to beat again, and I could feel my jaw grinding down my teeth into nothing but dust and my eyes start to spin and spiral in on themselves and oh god that thing was too big and too red and it was just hanging there and onetwothreefour god I could see it out there in the sky still and now here was this dumb fucking horse and its teeth were so gross and it smelled like feet and Stephanie grabbed my hand and unclenched my fist and stuck a handful of baby carrots in there and onetwothreefour she doesn’t actually like you she’s just pitying you and and she took my hand and put it through the fence and the horse got closer and everything seemed to get sucked into onetwothreefour into this same space of about six feet around me and oh God oh no and
And it kind of tickled. The horse’s wet lips deftly lifted the carrots from my hand, slobbering on my fingers as it grabbed the food. A sound like a dog snuffling under the table for scraps but through a megaphone accompanied the odd spectacle. Stunned, I watched the horse finish off the carrots in my hand, slurp up the few Stephanie had, and trot off towards the other end of the pasture. Huh.
“Still not a fan of horses?” Stephanie said. Absolutely not.
“Absolutely not,” I said. My free hand went up and down my buttons, and I counted them, but my eyes were focused on the horses as they grazed and wandered across the field. I took a deep, shuddering breath in. I counted my buttons one more time, and then pulled my hand and forced it into the pocket at my side. You are such a loser, she hates you
“Thank you,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to look at her.
“Of course, dude, I love visiting the horses. I’m always happy to take anyone out here and disrespect the establishment,” she said.
There were a few more minutes of silence as we stood and watched the horses. My hands itched to count the buttons, but not like they had earlier. It was an itch that wouldn’t really ever go away. No level of horse spit would fix that. Not much of anything would fix that. But I’d feed these horses every day if I had to. The alternative was much, much worse.
After what felt like way too long maybe the right amount of time, I turned to Stephanie. Try opening up, said the little voice. Friendships go two ways. “Can I tell you a story, too?” I said.
“Sure, dude, lay it on me. Is it more ghosts?”
“Something like that.”
END
And that is the end of “Periphery’s” alternate ending! What do you think? Did you think I was serious about the horses? Because I was. It’s super cheesy, isn’t it? Like extreme levels of cheese, especially at the end there. I could probably iron out some of that cheese in a second draft, but I don’t know if I could totally get rid of that kind of a tone without rewriting the thing. And right now, I don’t want to do that. For now, I am very much done with “Periphery.” Maybe I’ll get it to a second draft. Maybe not. I don’t honestly know! I think I need to move on, since I don’t think this one is much marketable anyway. Hopefully the next one will be.
As before, I’ll append the same notice to the bottom here, because I think it’s important for everyone to remember. If you or a loved one is dealing with suicidal ideations or considering self-harm, please know that you are loved and there is help out there. Consider the National Suicide Prevention Helpline (dial 988), or if you don’t like them, consider the Crisis Textline (text HOME to 741741) to text with trained counselors, which is a resource that I used and got help from years back. They’re good.
Suicide is not the answer. You can get help and you can get better.
As expected, I of course like this ending so much better!! Because it shows people it is possible to get better. We don’t know what will happen to Daniel next, but at least we know it is possible for him! Everyone needs hope. This gives people hope. I love you!