Plums

Story 4/5 Autumn 2025 Edition

Continuing our You Find Your Suicide Note edition of The Rejects is a short story by MB.

We will be dropping the last story written for the prompt tomorrow.

Every story is different, every last confession desperate.

Every note you didn’t write.

November is a month of dying,

George & M.P., Autumn Edition 2025.

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Plums

All left-handed people have the same handwriting. I never liked mine. No one taught me how to hold a pen properly, and it shows. The dot over the j is placed slightly off center.

Don’t jump. Don’t repeat my mistake. It’s worth it.

I never wrote this. I have been up here more than once of course, standing on the edge, my toes gripping onto it through my sneaker’s thin soles. Today is the day I’ll do it. I didn’t tell anyone. And why write a note for police officers I don’t know.

I came up here after work. I almost slipped on the icy ground and laughed at the thought of splitting my head open on the hard floor and dying alone on that snowy roof; of life finishing by itself what it started by itself. I smoked one last cigarette. I walked up to the edge, right behind the little electricity cabin with the red door. The same spot as usual.

Today is the day I’ll do it. Well, I was going to, until I saw that wet paper held down barely by that rust-red stone with the sharp edges. It’s a good stone, the kind of stone I would draw on the sidewalk with when I was a kid. Paint-stones, I called those.

My handwriting stares up at me like a scared bug stares at a shoe sole.

Don’t jump. Don’t repeat my mistake. It’s worth it.

What the hell. I bend down and pick it up, the wet paper almost ripping when I touch it. There’s a date in the corner, yesterday’s date. I didn’t come up here yesterday. I went to the graveyard, spent so much time walking around, past your grave; the gardener kicked me out at some point, because he thought I was a vandal waiting for the right moment. A vandal in his forties with a suit a size too small.

Maybe someone is playing a joke on me. Or whoever jumped last left this for the next suicidal widower. Another left-handed person, possibly. What is the statistical probability of two left-handed people committing suicide by jumping off the same building within two days? I suck at anything math-related, but this doesn’t seem plausible to me. I take a closer look. The ink seeps through the damp paper, which makes it hard to read the letters properly. The first e in repeat is smudged over an i, its dot almost faded entirely.

Okay, the statistical probability of two left-handed people who are both dyslexic committing suicide within two days on the same building is close to zero, I’d assume. Besides, if anyone jumped yesterday, it would’ve been all over the news. But how close is the probability of me being stuck in a time loop where I leave a suicide note for my future self? I would hope it’s even lower.

I step towards the edge again, leaning forward slightly. If I did this all before, shouldn’t there be some kind of inner calmness, of knowing how it feels when it all goes dark? They say the first time is the worst for about anything; if that is true for suicide, I don’t want to know what the last time felt like. I can feel my heart beating against my ribs.

I look down. I almost miss the body lying in the snow thirty meters below me. I look like I have been there for quite some time, my hair sticking up like red icicles. That angle of my arm doesn’t seem natural. I don’t know what I expected to look like after the jump (honestly, I didn’t think I would need to concern myself with it), but I look like a soft, mushy, purple plum someone stepped on. My mother used to make extraordinary plum cake, now that I come to think of it.

I take a step back, then a step forward again, then I throw up, onto my dead self. Some of my vomit slowly drops down the windows below me, most of it covers my body; a mushy, dead plum covered in greasy stomach acid. I wipe off my mouth with the sleeve of my too small suit.

I still have the paper in my hand; the wet material ripped apart where my fingernails dug into it, right before the word mistake. It stares at me, asking me if I want to look like smashed plum-pie, if I really think this is a good idea.

Okay, I need to focus. Suicide is a tough business. I won’t have to see myself, once I jumped. I will jump, the world will go black, I will be free. I lean forward once more and quickly pull back as my dead body comes into view. What if I jump and tomorrow I stand up here again, then two bodies lying below. A dead-people-stack that grows every day.

I take a step backwards, then another one. Maybe not even death will make it all go quiet, maybe even in death I won’t see you again; I will just see myself over and over and over and over. The paper in my hand is now nothing more than inky, wet slop; I shake my arm and it drops down my cold fingers.

Don’t repeat my mistake. Don’t keep looking every day.

I turn around, the door to the stairway is not far behind me, just five or six quick steps. I hear myself panting, rub off the remains of the paper on my hands. The door is heavy; I never thought I would need to open it again. I throw myself into it, shoulder first, it squeaks but doesn’t move. I push harder, one final throw.

The door opens. I stumble forward, my feet miss the stairs. I’m falling.

Let life finish what it started.

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For the longest time, MB was scared of her own writing. Now her writing is scared of her. Aside from that, she does her best to get through her degree and not lose her mind. Oh, and she likes her friends.