The Ever-Changing Book by Arthur Mandal

It was a frustrating book to read. He never actually saw the text shift before his eyes, never saw a sentence blur into something else right there on the page. Every time he flipped through the first half of the book, however, there seemed to be something different from the story he had read the night before. The workman who discovered the chest was a plumber who came across a barrel; the dog that barked all day became an owl that hooted all night. Tomas, the protagonist’s brother, wasn’t a Czech who worked in a grocery store, but a Pole who ran a warehouse. 

Whenever he tried to tell people about this, they thought he was crazy. His partner backed away from him as he spoke; his parents looked at one another with concern, when they thought he wasn’t watching. When he told his children what was happening, they hugged him. Without finishing it, he gave the book to other people to read, but nobody reported the same experience. It was just a book about a man who robs a bank, they said—what was there to be frustrated about? It wasn’t even a particularly good book. 

When he re-read the first half of the book for the tenth time, and found everything had shifted yet again, he resolved to do two things: first, he stopped telling anyone around him about his experience. When people asked, he said he was reading a novel about a bank robbery. Secondly, he started to change things every day. He called himself different names, ate different kinds of breakfast, confused friends with different greetings, used different times to do things in different ways. It was exhausting – but to his relief, the novel started to sound the same each time he opened it. The more he repeatedly changed his own daily life, the easier he found he could follow the plot of the novel. 

With a great deal of effort, he finished the book in a week.  He enjoyed it tremendously. When done, he drove to his local retail outlet, bought a paper shredder and spent an entire afternoon ripping out the pages and turning them into strips of shredded text. He made a fire in his garden to sprinkle the book’s remains on, whilst sipping vodka and cherry juice from a plastic tumbler in his free hand, and this constituted the last unusual thing he ever did. 

Arthur Mandal is a writer based in Eugene, Oregon (but grew up in the UK). He has published over 20 stories in The Barcelona Review, LITRO, december, 3:AM, The Forge Literary Magazine, Southeast Review, The Stand, The Summerset Review, Under the Radar, Bending Genres and others.

11 April 2025