The Answer Is No

Lucas has his life exactly the way he wants it. His idea of a perfect evening is video games, a glass of wine, and pad thai, with no one to answer to and nowhere to be. So when his apartment building's residents' board turns up at his door, brandishing an abandoned frying pan found by the recycling room and demanding to know whether it is his, Lucas simply says no — and unwittingly sets off an escalating, absurd campaign to identify the guilty party.

In this sharp, very short comic story, Fredrik Backman takes a tiny domestic non-event and inflates it into a farce about neighbors, bureaucracy, and the exhausting human insistence on other people's participation. Lucas would like nothing more than to be left alone; the world, and especially the residents' board, has other plans.

First published in Swedish as "Svaret är nej" and released in English as an Amazon Original Stories short in 2024, The Answer Is No is a quick, laugh-out-loud portrait of introversion and its discontents — Backman's signature warmth and wit distilled into a single, pointed vignette.