Fictional Stories for Fictional Audiences

The Endless Paradox

A Tale That Never Ends (and Never Begins)

Jun 13, 2025

Part 1: The Paradoxical Café

In the heart of the city, nestled between a bookstore that sold only blank pages and a barber who shaved everyone but himself, stood the Paradoxical Café. The sign above the door read:
“This Café Does Not Exist—Enter at Your Own Risk.”

Inside, the walls were lined with mirrors, each reflecting not the room, but the viewer’s own expectations. The menu was a single sheet of paper that changed every time someone tried to read it. One moment it offered “Unbaked Bread,” the next, “The Silence of a Whisper.”

A woman named Alice sat at a corner table, staring at her coffee cup. The cup was both empty and full, depending on how you looked at it.
“Is this coffee hot or cold?” Alice asked the waiter, a man who introduced himself as Paradox Pete.

“It’s Schrödinger’s Coffee,” Pete replied with a grin. “It’s both hot and cold until you drink it. But if you drink it, you’ll never know what it was before you did.”

Alice frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”

Pete shrugged. “Neither does the fact that I’m talking to you right now, but here we are.”

A man at the next table, who claimed to be a traveling liar, leaned over. “Everything I say is a lie,” he announced.

Alice turned to him. “Is that true?”

“If it is, then it’s a lie,” the man said. “If it’s a lie, then it’s true. You figure it out.”

Pete chuckled. “Welcome to the Paradoxical Café, where every answer is a question and every question is an answer.”

Alice sipped her coffee—or at least, she thought she did. The taste was both bitter and sweet, present and absent. She looked around. The other patrons were engaged in similarly baffling conversations.

One group debated whether the sentence “This sentence is false” was true or false.
Another tried to define the word “word” without using the word “word.”
A third laughed at a joke that wasn’t funny, because the punchline was that there was no punchline.

Alice noticed a sign above the restroom:
“This restroom is out of order—Please use the one that doesn’t exist.”

She turned back to Pete. “Is this place real?”

Pete winked. “It’s as real as you want it to be. Or as unreal. Or both. Or neither.”

At that moment, a cat—both alive and dead—wandered in from the kitchen, purring and not purring at the same time.

Alice’s head began to spin. She felt like she was both here and not here, understanding and not understanding.
“This is too much,” she said.

Pete nodded sympathetically. “That’s the point. Here, the only rule is that there are no rules—except for the rule that there are no rules. And that’s a rule, so it breaks itself.”

Alice sighed. “I think I need to lie down.”

“You can’t,” Pete said. “The beds here are only for people who are standing up.”

As Alice tried to make sense of it all, the door opened and a new customer walked in. The sign above the door now read:
“Welcome to the Paradoxical Café—You Are Now Leaving.”

Part 2: The Paradoxical Elevator

Alice, still dizzied by the café’s contradictions, decided to explore further. She stepped through a door marked “Exit: Entrance Only” and found herself in a long hallway lined with doors. Each door had a label that changed as she approached:

“This Door Is Always Open (But Never Unlocked)”
“Behind This Door Lies the Truth About Lies”
“You Must Knock to Enter, But Knocking Means You’re Already Inside”

She chose the third door and knocked.
To her surprise, her knock echoed from behind her. She turned—there was no one there. When she faced the door again, it was gone. In its place stood a tall, thin man in a suit that was both black and white.

“Welcome to the Paradoxical Elevator,” he said, gesturing to a sleek, mirrored box that wasn’t there a moment ago. “I am the Elevator Operator. You may call me Operator.”

“How does this elevator work?” Alice asked.

Operator smiled. “It only goes up if you want to go down, and it only goes down if you want to go up. Or, if you don’t press any buttons, it takes you exactly where you are.”

Alice hesitated, then stepped inside. The walls of the elevator were covered in words that rearranged themselves as she read them:

“This sentence will end before it begins.”
“The word ‘word’ is not a word.”
“If you can read this, you’re not reading it.”

Operator pressed a button labeled “Nowhere/Everywhere”. The elevator jolted, then remained perfectly still.

“Are we moving?” Alice asked.

“We are always moving,” Operator replied. “But only when we’re not.”

Alice noticed a small screen displaying a riddle:
“What is the answer to the question you’re not asking?”

She thought for a moment, then said, “I don’t know.”

“Correct!” Operator beamed. “The answer to the unasked question is always unknown. But since you just answered it, it’s now known, which means it’s no longer the answer.”

The elevator doors opened to reveal a room filled with clocks. Each clock told a different time, and each second hand moved at a different speed. One clock’s face read: “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

A woman in a lab coat approached. “Welcome to the Temporal Paradox Lab,” she said. “I’m Dr. Chronos. Or am I?”

Alice blinked. “Are you or aren’t you?”

Dr. Chronos shrugged. “I am if you think I am. But if you don’t, I’m not. Or maybe I’m both. Or neither. It’s a bit of a time loop.”

She led Alice to a machine labeled “The Causality Reverser”.
“This device makes effects happen before their causes,” Dr. Chronos explained. “For example, you can stub your toe after you yell in pain.”

Alice tried it. She shouted “Ouch!” and then stubbed her toe on the machine. It hurt just as much as if she’d done it the other way around.

“Does this mean I caused my own pain before it happened?” Alice asked.

Dr. Chronos nodded. “Or maybe the pain caused you to shout before you felt it. Or maybe the shout and the pain are the same thing, happening in different orders at the same time.”

Alice felt a headache coming on.
“This is all very confusing,” she said.

“Exactly!” Dr. Chronos said. “Confusion is the only thing that’s clear here.”

Just then, the elevator doors opened again. Operator stepped out, but he was also still inside the elevator. He waved at himself.

“Time to go,” said the Operator inside the elevator.
“But I’m already here,” said the Operator outside.

Alice stepped out, only to find herself back in the Paradoxical Café. The cat was now both inside and outside its box, and the menu now read:
“Order anything you like, as long as it’s not on the menu.”

Alice sat down, more bewildered than ever. She realized that every answer she sought only led to more questions, and every question seemed to answer itself before she could ask it.

Part 3: The Paradoxical End… Or Is It?

Alice, her mind spinning from the café, the elevator, and the Temporal Paradox Lab, was now determined to find an exit—or at least, an explanation. But in the Paradoxical Café, exits were never what they seemed.

She approached the counter, where Paradox Pete was now serving tea to a customer who insisted, “I never drink tea.”

“How can I leave?” Alice asked.

Pete smiled. “You already have. Or you never arrived. Or both. Or neither. It’s all a matter of perspective.”

A sign above the counter flickered:
“This is the last sentence of the story. (But it’s not.)”

Alice sighed. “Is there any way to make sense of all this?”

Pete handed her a small, blank card. “Write your own ending,” he said.

Alice stared at the card. It was blank, but as she held it, words began to appear:

“The only way to finish this story is to start it again.”

She looked up. The café had transformed into a library. The shelves were filled with books whose titles changed as she read them:

“The Book That Contains All Books (Except This One)”
“How to Read Without Reading”
“The End of Paradoxes (A Paradoxical Guide)”

A librarian—who was also the cat from earlier, now wearing glasses—approached.
“Welcome to the Library of Infinite Loops,” the cat-librarian said. “Here, every story ends where it begins, and every beginning is an ending in disguise.”

Alice felt a tug at her thoughts.
“Is there a way out of the paradoxes?” she asked.

The cat-librarian purred. “If you find a way out, you’ll only find your way back in. The exit is the entrance, and the entrance is the exit. The only escape is to stay.”

Alice sat down at a table. The blank card in her hand now read:
“This sentence is false.”

She realized that every answer she sought was a question, and every question was its own answer. The more she tried to understand, the less she knew—and the less she knew, the more she understood.

The lights in the library dimmed. The cat-librarian closed its eyes and whispered,
“The story is over. Or is it just beginning?”

Alice closed her eyes too. When she opened them, she was back at the entrance of the Paradoxical Café. The sign above the door now read:
“Welcome. You have never been here before. (But you have.)”

She took a deep breath and stepped inside, knowing that the only way to truly finish the story was to start it all over again.

And so, the story ended exactly where it began—which meant it never ended at all.

The End (or is it?)

“This story is a paradox—it ends only if you believe it does.”

Thank you!

Prompting Culture

Discussion about this post