0. Read Me First
Most stories are about other people. This story is about you.
Even if this wedding you are going to is NOT your wedding, this story is still about you.
You get to make choices. You chose to buy a new suit last week. You’ve always wanted a blue suit, blue like the ocean used to be. And you love it, even though it was made for men so the shoulders are a bit too wide and the pants hug your hips. Adjust the matching blue vest in the mirror. Don’t think about your credit cards screaming under their laminate. Don’t listen to your phone, buzzing incessantly with text messages. You already know what these texts say.
Don’t do it.
Even if the wedding you are going to is not your wedding, is in fact the wedding of the person you used to love and once knew you would marry, you want to believe this is still your story. You’re the one going to the wedding. You were invited. You didn’t have to go, but you’re going. That was totally a choice.
Don’t go.
So it’s your story. It’s you in the mirror, watching the erosion where your perfect jawline used to be.
Should you go? Why would you even go? Amal is still texting.
DO. NOT. GO.
Because it’s Lex’s wedding, and Amal thinks you’re not over Lex.
Because this is a queer wedding, which, as some people have loudly argued (maybe you, maybe at The Paradise, maybe holding on to the sticky bar ledge for support and turning around to address the crowd), is an oxymoron, because all that work just to end up right back in the heteropatriarchal institution is quite simply not what it was all for.
Because here is a Very Interesting Book you’re reading for the thesis you’re absolutely finishing this year, and you could just stay home and read this book. On Free Choice of the Will. Now what’s more interesting than that?
On the other hand, you are actually handsome, or beautiful, or stunning in this ocean-blue vest you’re wearing, and a shirt cut to accentuate your arms, and your tattoos, and your new haircut, and the secondary trim you gave yourself this morning to make it perfect. And you like the silver coming in at your temples, and you like the way age is giving you the cheekbones you never had in that baby phase.
Wedding or no wedding (you check to see if your ass looks good; it does), it’s all about community.
So this is your story. This is a book day about you, and what happens when you make a choice. Because you have choices.
Do not read this book from the first page to the last page. Instead, start here, in this apartment where you still have a roommate, who is about to start banging on the door, at what you might as well call…
(Proceed to Section 1)
1. Rock Bottom.
Then you can decide what to do.
If you come to a bad end, it’s your own damn fault. You can always come home and read your book. You can always go back and start over again. Every new choice leads to a new adventure, right?
When you were a child, you loved stories that gave you choices, especially the haunted-house ones. How do you feel about choices now? You clip a hair.
Your roommate bangs on the door, shaking the mirror. BANG. BANG. “No one is going to [BANG] take a ruler to your head, you Virgo abomination!” [BANG]
“Last minute,” you say, wishing you had a tiny ruler.
Wash your thin hair down the drain. Squeeze past your roommate, who is on their way to yet another picnic, or marathon, or well-adjusted social event. Look in the smaller mirror in the rented room you somehow still live in, with the wallpaper you’ve always hated. Are you talking to yourself? Stop.
So. Take one last look at yourself, meet your eyes, exhale. And then find your wallet, phone, keys, the tiny bottle of coconut rum you bought just in case. And the knife engraved with your initials + Lex’s initials. Lex who is getting married to someone else.
Why, again, are you going to the wedding of this person you used to love?
Because you were invited! Because you want to make a good-faith showing! Because you want to believe in something, maybe community, maybe choice, maybe even love. You slip the knife into your bag.
Because here is your invitation, in your hand, with folds. Somehow you got an invitation.
Lex & Swen
Request the pleasure of your company
Guest: Max “Ducky” Aydin
At their wedding celebration.
Please R.S.V.P.
You already made a choice. You R.S.V.P.’d. One (just one) for Ducky, to the wedding of Lex, who was supposed to be yours and is now Swen’s. Forever. And ever.
It’s great. Love is great. So you’re going.
You call a rideshare.
Your adventure begins here, officially. But you haven’t really had much of a choice yet, and that’s okay.
(To get in your rideshare, skip ahead to Section 3, Rideshare, p. 13)
47. A Kiss at the End of the World
On a balcony above a green lawn, you reach out for Lex.
You’re not supposed to be here.
Her wedding dress is torn on the right side, showing her legs and the combat boots she always insisted on wearing, and around you there is cheering.
Hey.
Not cheering. Around you there is screaming, the screaming of wedding guests below, who are looking up at the sky and screaming. But to you here, on this balcony with the romantic wrought-iron railing that is already beginning to bubble in the heat, it feels like cheering. Maybe they’re cheering for you. Standing so close to Lex, you can’t feel the heat—the way it sucks energy from the space, the way it covers the skin in plastic wrap and the plastic wrap is melting, because here is Lex, her perfect mouth, and the freckle to the right of it, and the constellation of freckles bridging her nose, as if a painter fainted backward while flicking their paintbrush up.
What are you doing here?
The light is doing something it’s never done before. Distantly, you know this is not good, this particular light and the big burning brightness gradually obscuring the sky as it gets closer and closer, almost eclipsing the blue, while the people below are screaming and hugging, not cheering.
“For what it’s worth,” Lex begins, as a roof tile flies past her head. She doesn’t finish the sentence. She never needed to finish a sentence with you. You know For what it’s worth. You can feel the shift in the balcony through your feet, the rumble of the ground far below, the floorboards shifting.
You will never know which moment comes first, the kiss or the darkness, your lips touching or the ice cap melting, the blood rushing down from your belly or the last fish belly up in the Ocean, the last lurch of your heart toward Lex or the last pigment of color sucked from a reef, the last dark shape sinking down to the sand in an empty blue room that was once an ocean. What you know is the softness of her mouth, the taste of lipstick, and the noise beyond you.
Somewhere outside, coming closer and closer, is a burning mass, illuminating you from one side, and you have time to think that the two of you can’t possibly look good lit from the side like that. But when you look at Lex, all you feel is excitement and delight, like a sunny Saturday morning, even as the burning rock is coming straight toward the face of the earth, and the face of this person you love is smiling at you, and this whole time the little kid inside you is asking if it’s Saturday, is it Saturday? Like wide-open possibility, like—
A flash of light, so bright it feels like darkness. And nothing else after that.
Unless—
Stop RIGHT THERE.
I see you. Did you just sail on down here from the last chapter? I think I made myself really clear: You are not supposed to be here. At least not yet.
I’m trying to help you. There is nothing to be gained here by following things in linear time, Ducky. You always get ahead of yourself.
If this is going to work, if you want a chance at surviving, you have to do what I say. Please. I know you want to choose your adventure, and I’m going to give you so many choices. Just please follow my lead.
If you don’t, you’ll get lost. How are you going to save anything if you get lost?
Of course, you can always walk away. Right now. You could decide not to go to the wedding:
You receive the invitation from the person you used to love and who ruined your reputation before disappearing for a decade, and you read it over and over, even turn over the envelope to see that it was indeed addressed to you. There is a sticker depicting the Andromeda galaxy on the other side. You run your hands over the weave of the expensive paper and the shiny sticker. You smile and shake your head, and remember Lex fondly. She was so quick to forgive. Of course she would invite you to her wedding.
At this moment, you could trace the scars she left on your forearms, and you could think about that time you and Lex and Athena and Amal ate pizza on your green couch in a home you all shared.
The pizza was a compromise you had to beg for personally on the phone, half vegan and half mushroom, and even then no one was happy, because the vegan cheese gave everything a yeasty kind of taste and Amal always ended up eating real cheese in the end anyway, but tonight none of you cared.
“I’ve called you here tonight because I have a plan,” Lex said. In deference to Athena, she had taken off her boots, even though she had to be asked almost every single time.
Amal would have rolled her eyes, but she was already reaching for a slice of real-cheese pizza because everyone was looking at Lex. You caught her eye and smiled, and Amal smiled back. (In this memory, you haven’t slept together yet, you still both have received notions about what housemates should and should not do, but you notice that Amal, whose legs are draped around Thena’s, is careful to keep a distance between them, and you begin to wonder.)
“Are you listening?” Lex said. “I said I have a plan to become rich and save the world.”
And because it was Lex, you all listened, and you sat on that couch and imagined a future of green sidewalks and zebras brought back from extinction, galloping down Market Street in a cloud of monarch butterflies.
Ducky, you could leave that moment right there, resigned to its place in your past. And you could sit here in the future and draw yourself a bath instead.
You could take the high road and never engage, even though this person has taken everything from you. Or you could go to the wedding. For revenge. For love. For something you don’t even have the words for yet. You could stay home, read your book, and write your stupid thesis on choice. Or you could go. Or not. You could stay in this loop forever, the end.
But if you want any chance of getting out of this experience alive, I need you to trust me. At least for now.
So would you please go to Section 3, p. 13?
3. Rideshare
I like it when you do as you’re told 🙂
The rideshare driver doesn’t talk to you and doesn’t ask where you’re going, looking so fabulous. Maybe he’s one of those cheap dummies they use to humanize electric cars. But he isn’t. He follows the map projected on his front window like he’s really driving, and maybe he is. Unlike a dummy, he keeps looking back at you through the rearview, at your hair, at your jewelry, at your fabulous suit, and instead of appreciating the tie-pin shaped like a spider, he reaches out to turn up the volume on the Jesus Station. Sure, it’s called the Positivity Station, but now here in the back of the car with you, via crackly audio, are many white men trying to melisma Jee-hee-hee-suh-hu-sus, so you know it’s the Jesus station.
You pull out your phone. Texts from Amal.
Amal: you’re not going to this wedding are you?
You: No comment.
Amal: Whyyyyyyyyyy (There are three scrolls of y.)
Why are you going to this wedding?
| One: To apologize to Athena, once and for all.
Because you miss her friendship. Because you’re ready to say you’re wrong. Section 13 |
Two: To stop the wedding.
Because no matter what anyone says about choice, Lex is making the wrong choice. Section 24 |
Three: To show up for my friend no matter what.
Because you’re a good friend, even when it hurts. Because this is the kind of friend you are. Section 66 |
Four: Maybe you should turn back.
Proceed to the next page. |
4. Maybe You Should Turn Back
You should just turn back. You wonder if you’ve left the oven on. Or a candle. Or a candle in the oven with the cat. Your roommate’s orange cat is in the oven with a lit candle, and the oven is also a washing machine, turning, flooding the floor with water and burning cat, and singed orange fur is catching in the uneven tile.
Should you turn back?
“Hey.”
Jee-he-sus…
Jee-he-sus…
“Hey,” you say again, louder, to the driver. “I think I need to turn around.”
No.
“Too late,” the driver says, not even looking back at you but driving with that fixed stare, that blinkered pretend-focus that slides over people’s faces these days when it happens. You smell the landslide before you turn your head, the freshness of uprooting and the rot underneath, like fresh cut grass, and a dead rabbit caught in a fence like in a fairy tale. The other side of the road, the way home, is now gone, buried.
And your rideshare driver says the thing you’ve heard so many times before and have stopped arguing with: This wouldn’t have happened if we had just paid attention.
There is no option here.
This decision has been closed off.
Try again.
Why are you going to this wedding?
| One: To apologize.
Section 13 |
Two: To stop the wedding.
Section 24 |
Three. To show up for my friend.
Section 66 |
Four: Turn back.
|
It’s time to make a decision, Ducky. You need to learn to make up your mind.
—
Author’s Statement
I define myself as a writer and immersive-experience creator in search of the queer love language of climate change, which means that I am curious about the ways in which language and queer technologies of care allow us to co-create one another and imagine new ways of being.
My first book, What a Fish Looks Like, was written in the form of flyers, letters, and notes written in the margins of a fairy-tale book. I wanted to ask what storytelling means to a community in a city ravaged by climate change. In this, my second book, I want to understand what it means to make a choice. I want to know if stories and/or language can draw a door where there wasn’t one before.
DOOR #3 uses the structure of a choose-your-own adventure book, but it’s set in a world where climate change is rapidly reducing those choices. I want to ask: How does climate change narrow our options and create new pathways, and what does it mean to create new possibilities outside of the choices we’ve been given? The reader/protagonist, Ducky, is invited to their ex’s wedding, which means returning to a community they’ve been estranged from. Through a series of choices, the reader/Ducky gets to misbehave, or apologize, or simply watch the world burn—unless they can create a new option.
As a queer and nonbinary person, I am deeply invested in the fact that throughout history, there are people who have invented new choices out of thin air, and so this book is an experiment with the reader: can we create a new choice? DOOR #3 both branches and cinches until it culminates in two endings, along with a third (secret) ending that you can get to only by rebelling against the voice that tells you your choices are limited. I want to believe that the capacity to create new possibilities belongs to all of us and is something we can practice together. This book is my collaboration with the reader and a flawed, messy protagonist who is nobody’s activist but who nevertheless belongs here at the end of the world, like we all do. I believe that together we can draw a door.
Syr Hayati Beker (they/them) is a writer and immersive creator in search of the queer love language of climate change. They are the author of What a Fish Looks Like (Stelliform Press), which was BSFA-nominated and a 2025 Otherwise Award Nominee. Their work appears in Foglifter, Joyland, Fairy Tale Review, F(r)iction, Michigan Quarterly Review, Spunk, Gigantic Sequins, ECO25: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction, and in theaters, pirate ships, galleries, and queer bars near you.
Embark, Issue 25, October 2026
