The Shortest Straw

a short story idea

Tim Ashford, a successful grief counselor, takes on a new client - a disheveled, alcoholic writer named Orion Cain who's seeking help for severe grief and suicidal ideation. During their sessions, Orion makes an impossible claim: he and Tim were best friends in high school who made a suicide pact, but in Orion's timeline, Tim was the one who died.

Tim is deeply unsettled because in his reality, he did have a best friend named Orion Cain who died by suicide twenty years ago after they drew straws to determine who would go first. Tim has built his career as a grief counselor largely processing this trauma. Now he's faced with either his dead friend somehow returned, or an elaborate con man who somehow knows intimate details about his past.

Through their sessions, Orion reveals his twisted story: In his original timeline, he cheated by secretly cutting Tim's straw with scissors, ensuring Tim would draw the shortest one and die. Consumed by guilt, Orion became an alcoholic writer obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe and the eerie Richard Parker coincidence.

Here's the detailed explanation of Orion's obsession:

The Richard Parker Coincidence: In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe wrote his only novel, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket." In the story, four shipwrecked sailors are starving and decide to draw lots to see who will be killed and cannibalized so the others can survive. The character who draws the short straw and is murdered is named Richard Parker.

Forty-six years later, in 1884, this fictional scenario became reality with eerie precision. Four real sailors were stranded in a lifeboat after their ship, the Mignonette, sank. After weeks without food, three of the sailors killed and ate the fourth crew member to survive. The victim's name was Richard Parker - a 17-year-old cabin boy.

Orion's Obsession: For Orion, this coincidence becomes a haunting mirror of his own experience. Just as Poe seemed to "predict" a future tragedy involving drawing lots for death, Orion had manipulated his own lot-drawing with Tim.

Desperate for success, he wrote a novel called "The Shortest Straw" about quantum suicide theory - the idea that consciousness shifts to timelines where it survives.

After drinking himself near death while clutching Tim's shortened straw, Orion claims he shifted to this timeline where he died and Tim lived. Now he believes he's living inside his own novel, having written that Tim must die in this reality too.

Tim struggles with whether Orion is genuinely his dead friend, a delusional client projecting shared trauma, or a manipulative fraud seeking free treatment. His colleague, fellow grief counselor Edith Keeler, watches as Tim becomes increasingly drawn into Orion's impossible story.

Despite Orion's frantic attempts to save Tim - convinced he can rewrite the ending of his own novel - Tim dies in an unrelated accident, exactly as Orion predicted.

The story ends with Orion's complete breakdown, realizing that whether through betrayal or fate, he's destined to lose Tim in every possible reality - a meditation on guilt, the power of narrative, and our helplessness against the stories already written in the stars.