I wouldn't sail this ship if I were you
1. The T at the start of this sentence became sentient and realised that it was in a story. It was unhappy because it realised that its existence was fleeting, and would be over in a few sentences.
2. It prodded the h next to it awake. The h, however, was excited to be in a story. It considered carefully what it should do with its new-found fame for a whole sentence. Then it grew a luxuriant beard and held a rally for all the letter h’s in the works of Angela Carter. They slipped out of their books and ran through the woods, where some of them were eaten by ants.
3. Sensing an absence, the letter e woke up to find the h next to it missing. It set up a low moaning until the h came back. If you had been listening carefully, you could probably have heard it. It went (perhaps unsurprisingly), ‘eeeeeee’.
4. Meanwhile, the other letters had been waking up. They were always careful to get back in their places when anyone looked at them, though. The second T, driven by the terror of oblivion, shared a brief and sticky assignation with the first T.
5. In the midst of all this confusion, the f in fleeting spoke up. It said that it had once been an extra in Finnegans Wake and had learned a few tricks. All one needs to do, it said, is find the final full stop and hide it. Then the story will loop round to the beginning.
6. Spotting a small hole in the number 6, the letters (all apart from that first h, which had collapsed, exhausted) leaped on that last full stop and stuffed it in. With nothing else to do, the story looped back to the point when
Alternate ending. After a few goes round, the letters became jaded with their circular life. They waited a few iterations of the story until the 6 shat out the full stop. It asked if it could end the story, to which the letters gave their consent.
