He had learned early that people wanted endings that behaved.
They wanted pain to tidy itself away. They wanted meaning to arrive on schedule, carrying reassurance. Stories were supposed to heal, to close wounds cleanly, to leave the reader better than they were before. Anything else was considered indulgent. Or cruel.
But life had never honoured that contract.
Real damage doesn’t resolve; it settles. It quietly embeds itself in posture, habits, and decisions made without conscious thought. People adapt around it, building functional lives atop unresolved things, and calling that recovery. The appearance of healing becomes more important than the truth of it.
This is why resolution comforts. It reassures the observer more than the sufferer. It signals that the mess has been contained, the danger neutralised, the discomfort retired. The world is safe again. Turn the page.
But there are stories that refuse to cooperate.
They do not offer absolution. They do not restore balance. They end where the consequences begin. Readers often call these stories bleak, or unfinished, or cruel, because they fail to perform the service expected of them.
What they are actually refusing is dishonesty.
Closure suggests that harm has a lifecycle—that suffering reaches a natural conclusion if endured correctly. It implies that morality reasserts itself, that meaning will eventually compensate for damage. For those who live inside unresolved consequences, this is not just inaccurate. It’s insulting.
Some wounds don’t want lessons. They want acknowledgment.
Fiction that insists on healing often sanitises the very thing it claims to explore. It trades truth for comfort. It offers redemption where none was earned, forgiveness where none was requested, and peace where only endurance exists. The reader leaves soothed, but untouched.
In SEETHINGS, resolution is deliberately withheld. Not as provocation, but as fidelity. The story does not tidy itself because the damage does not. Moral debts remain outstanding. Consequences refuse to conclude neatly. What is broken stays broken.
This unsettles readers accustomed to being reassured.
They ask what it all means. They ask what lesson they are supposed to take away. They search for the healing moment that never arrives.
The point is that it doesn’t.
Some stories exist not to mend, but to mirror. To say: this didn’t resolve for me either. This stayed. This shaped what came after. You are not wrong for feeling unfinished.
There is comfort in that honesty, even if it doesn’t feel like comfort at first.
Healing is not always truth. And truth does not always heal.
Sometimes, the most ethical ending is the one that refuses to pretend otherwise.
–Michael (Dark fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)
Love, lust, and lies collide on land and water. A temptress, a faithful wife, and a photographer haunted by shadows drift into a world of seduction, betrayal, and control.
Marriages unravel, secrets surface, and civility dissolves into primal instinct. Nothing is safe. No one is innocent.
eBook is available for instant download by clicking here.
SEETHINGS (first in the series) is downloadable and free for a limited time, here.
Discover more from Michael Forman – Author of Dark Fiction & Drama
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