em dash

a short story

Mina takes a sip of strong Arabic coffee and opens her laptop. She has just closed the window, and the cold air sends a shiver down her spine.

A message from Short200Contest.

She fidgets in her seat, a wide smile spreading across her face. She touches her blue glass necklace with her left hand as she opens the message and reads:

“Your short story Winds, submitted to our contest, has been found to use AI-generated material. This constitutes a violation of our competition’s rules. You are disqualified.”

The words are right there in front of her, yet Mina struggles to understand them.

What the hell?

She grabs her phone and makes a call.

“Chris? You won’t believe this,” she blurts out as soon as her friend answers. “The magazine running the contest disqualified me. They said I used AI.”

“Uh… did you?”

Mina’s vision clouds. She swallows hard before answering: “Chris, you know me! I need to write, it’s how I deal with my anxiety. Why would I waste my time with AI?”

Why is she even asking that?

“It doesn’t make sense. I wrote two hundred words about hope. About me. Why would they think I used AI?”

Mina keeps talking, feeling a desperate need to explain herself. She draws tiny circles on the notebook beside her laptop.

“Right.”

“Do you believe me?”

“Uh-huh.” Her friend’s replies are short, clipped, and Mina can’t get over the fact that Chris even asked if she’d used AI.

“I’ll call you later.” Mina doesn’t feel like talking to Chris anymore. Her temples throb painfully, so she decides to take an aspirin.

Then an idea hits her. Mina opens the file she submitted to the contest, rereads every word, every emotion—and then she sees it. Shining there, right in the middle of the longest paragraph in the shortest story: the em dash.

Could that tiny mark be to blame?

She knows there’s an uproar online about the trouble caused by the humble dash—that writers are adapting their style because the rise of AI has ruined it. There’s growing paranoia about em dashes, en dashes, ellipses, semicolons, or any punctuation mark slowly vanishing from everyday writing.

Who even bothers with punctuation anymore?

“It’s just a breath’s pause. I need every bit of help I can get in a short text,” she mutters at the laptop screen.

She takes another sip of coffee and calls Chris again, to tell her about the revelation. The em dash is to blame.

No answer. The silence on the other end leaves Mina hanging.

Are we even friends? It’s not the first time Mina asks herself this.

They’d met at a book club ten years ago, shared a coffee, and somehow stayed close, reading each other’s work regularly. Chris was the first to read Winds. Mina doesn’t have anyone else to share her passion for writing with.

Her phone rings. She picks it up quickly and starts to speak:

“I can’t believe you think I—”

“Chris told me you cheated.”

Shocked silence. Mina was so sure Chris was calling her back that she hadn’t even checked the number.

“What? Lydia, is that you?” She rubs the skin of her neck as if the necklace has suddenly turned hot.

Mina never liked Lydia. She always seems to have endless time to waste online and still somehow manages to write three books a year. Mina barely gets through one (editing not included).

“AI means plagiarism. You steal our ideas.”

“Lydia, you’re wrong. I didn’t use AI—I think it’s because of an em dash in the text. It’s not fair that I have to change my writing style. I want to ask the organizers if that’s the reason. Have you talked to Chris?”

“She told me you were disqualified. You’re literally a data thief. And no serious contest will even answer that kind of question. Aren’t you ashamed?”

Lydia’s words bite. Mina feels them like a train coming straight at her. The heat of shame replaces the blood in her veins. Her palms grow damp, and her breath comes in uneven gasps.

“Lydia, I didn’t cheat. Writing is everything to me.”

Lydia hangs up, and a violent silence follows. So heavy Mina can feel her pulse explode.

She needs that aspirin. Still too weak to go to the kitchen for a glass of water, she slides down to the floor, curling up with her head between her knees. She keeps her eyes shut tight until her eyelids hurt.

Mina follows her breathing routine, trying to clear her mind of negative thoughts, just as she does each day with the app on her phone.

What am I going to do?

A chime from her laptop speakers. Messages. Too many. The stream doesn’t stop.

Did it spread? From her corner, she can almost see the accusations crawling across the screen: Thief. Prompt writer. Faker. Bot whisperer. Word vomiter. Machine muse. AI parasite. Talentless typer.

Mina feels their weight. Their brutality. She doesn’t dare move for hours. She stays crushed beneath the accusations until a thin thread of thought slips into her mind.

I guess that’s it.

Her eyes flutter open. Night has fallen. She tries to stand, but her aching joints protest. It takes her ages to turn on the light.

Mina takes the laptop, slides it into its sleeve, zips it shut, and sets it up on the wardrobe.

I’m average. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been AI-rated. Marginal. All my efforts mean nothing.

The isolation of writing has shattered her. It’s time to move on to something else.