Dreams have been done to death

by Luke Tarassenko

“Dreams have been done to death,” my editor said to me.

He sat stiffly on the comfy café chair in his too-tight pinstripe suit, pale lips thinning to a line in his pasty white face. He patted the head of the alligator in his lap.

“I know, I know,” I said, “believe me, I know. But I can’t help it; I’ve got this idea and it just won’t leave me alone.” My chest was a birdcage shrinking around my heart.

“Ugh, fine.” His eyes rolled. “I’ll hear the pitch. Go on then, what have you got?”

I swallowed. “Well, I’ve been having this recurring dream lately, you see, and in the dream I’m reading a short story. No, it’s not a short story; it’s really more a piece of flash fiction.”

“What’s ‘flash fiction’?” said my editor at once, cocking his head. The alligator raised its own head and looked at me, and then at him, as if to say, “What’s he going on about, Daddy?” Beady eyes stared at me down an unnervingly long, snot-green snout.

“You haven’t read any flash fiction?” I said, trying to hide my surprise. “It’s mainly about length, really. If a novel is an affair, and a short story is a one-night stand, then a piece of flash fiction is a… well, a flash, I suppose.”

“Okaaay…” said my editor. The alligator got down from his lap and started to slink across the wooden floorboards toward me, putting one clawed foot carefully in front of the other in slow motion. “And what is this piece of ‘flash fiction’ that you’re reading in your dream about, then?” He pronounced the words ‘flash fiction’ as if he was actually saying ‘sheer bollocks’.

I gulped again. “Well, that’s just it. It’s a piece of flash fiction about me pitching a piece of flash fiction…”

“Well, that’s very ‘meta’, isn’t it? You might say it’s so meta it doesn’t know what it even is...” The alligator sped up a bit.

“But hear me out,” I said, my eyes on the alligator, pulling at the collar of my shirt to loosen its hold on my neck. “This got me thinking. Of course, you’re right, dreams have been done to death: Alice in Wonderland, The Matrix, Inception… ‘Here we go again’. The big cliché is that art is like a dream that you enter into, right? But. What if we flipped that on its head? What if we were to imply that, in actuality, the art is what is most real, that the people in the artwork are the real people, and that what is a dream, a fabrication, a wisp of transient fiction, is the audience’s life?”

For a moment the alligator froze in place. Then, slowly, it turned its scaly head to look back at my editor, as though waiting to see what he would say.

My editor leant back and brought his cup of steaming pygmy juice to his mouth, sipping it. “Intriguing,” he said. My heart did not beat. “It sounds completely unsellable, though.” My heart began to beat again, even faster than before, and the alligator began to move toward me once more. “Where are you going with all of this, Luke?” My editor licked his lips.

I had been given a brief window of hope, but it was rapidly shrinking; I must prise it open again. “What I’m suggesting is that I write a piece of flash fiction about me pitching you the idea of me writing a piece of flash fiction about me pitching you the idea of me writing a piece of flash fiction, and so on, ad infinitum.”

“I think you mean ad nauseam,” said my editor. “How long would this piece of flash fiction be?”

The alligator was close to me now. I could hear it humming a tune softly under its breath. I think it was the riff from ‘Wake Up’ by Rage Against the Machine, which sounded strangely ominous coming from the nostrils of a reptile.

“A thousand words at most!” I gasped. “It’ll be a succinct piece of postmodern artwork that explores the interfaces and boundaries between fiction and reality, tracing the complex narratives that can emerge at their multifaceted intersections! W-w-what do you think?”

The alligator paused.

My editor paused.

I paused.

“I think it’s the biggest crock of bullshite anyone’s ever pitched to me,” said my editor.

The alligator took a snap at me. I yelped and pulled my feet up onto my armchair.

“What?!” I said. “Come on, Otto! It’s not that bad!

“No, I’m serious, Luke,” he said. “It’s utter, utter shite. I mean, you might as well write about us having this conversation in this café.”

“Well it’s funny you should mention that Otto, but do you ever get the feeling that we are just characters being written, or read, by someone else?”

“Oh, all the time,” said my editor.

The alligator stopped again for a moment, and grunted. In the grunt, I could have sworn it said, “Huh?”

“Really?” I hazarded.

“No, you fool!” said my editor.

By now I had started to cry. My words came out in a terrified torrent. “But Otto, haven’t you ever wondered if we’re not just two invented characters conversing inanely in someone else’s mind? Wouldn’t it be interesting to explore this theme through a short piece of fiction using the metaphor of dreams?”

“No! It would not!” said my editor, standing up.

The alligator’s teeth sunk into my leg like a hundred tiny scalpels, piercing me, dissecting me, alligating me. I screamed.

“Do not produce this piece of ‘flash fiction’!” shouted my editor. “It is a terrible idea! It is garbage! Nonsense! Effluence!”

My last thought before the alligator gobbled me up was that, if dreaming in fiction is a cliché, then dying in dreams in fiction is a cliché within a cliché.

Then I fell asleep.