By Sarah Hirons
Fluorescent lights flicker and hum as I walk between the stacks. Scanning the shelves, I stop abruptly. I’m at the Dream Library, but the flimsy plastic card in my hand is not my own. It’s my birth mother’s. And this is her shelf.
Each volume holds a year of dreams. I open the seventh, bound in a fierce July blue:
A red satin ribbon. Sticky watermelon juice.
The twelfth:
Bare feet on rough bark. Shouts. Darkness.
Sixteenth:
Crushing weight. Muffled screams…
I slam it shut.
Book seventeen is the last. Golden yellow, containing a single page:
Tiny fists. Deep, deep love.
Brilliant. I can’t stop thinking about this story.
So much said in so little words. This is really well written.
This made me think of the dream library in Murakami’s “Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.”
This is a great example of how to write micro fiction, succinct and dramatic. Well done!