The Dream Journal: A Dark Surreal Fiction Short Story (Thirteen Mirror Series #1).

Joanne was still working in her office well past after everyone had left the office. She was so immersed in her work that she didn’t even notice when her colleague bid her a good night. She didn’t respond so he left, turning off all the office lights and locking the door behind him.

She sat at her desk, staring at the monitor, chewing on her red pencil and deep in thought, wondering why the author had taken her last edit pass so personally. His manuscript was not yet ready and it needed a few more passes before it would be ready for publishing.

“Once again, he keeps making these careless mistakes”, she said as she clicked the print icon. The printer began choking immediately before Joanne even stood up to retreive the pages. Three pages came out hot and curled. The fourth stopped halfway, trapped under the rollers with one wet black stripe through the margin note: Can we soften her here?

Joanne kept her left thumb pressed to page 214 until the cut reopened. She had cut it earlier in the day trying to slice into a bagel at the office kitchen. Paper dust stuck in the wound. A bead of blood lifted beside the nail, bright enough to look gross under the fluorescent tubes. Above the desk, the deadline sheet peeled from its tape and rhythmically tapped the wall in the thin draft leaking under the loading dock door.

The notification preview on her desktop popped up with the subject line: Clean pass before morning. The email sat unread in the corner of the monitor. She had opened it twice and closed it twice and still knew every word. Deadline. Appreciation. Quick turnaround. Don’t overthink. Blah, blah. She ignored it again, but sent the entire manuscript to the warehouse industrial printer. The warehouse heat had softened the manuscript stack at the edges. Damp cardboard sagged in the storage rows behind her. Old glue sat under the toner smell, thick and sweet, with something sour from the cold coffee she had forgotten until the surface wrinkled gray in the mug.

Back at her desk, Joanne dragged the cursor over the line again: I wanted to break every plate in that clean white kitchen because no one had ever let me make a mess and stay loved. She stared at it. The red pencil lay beside the keyboard, worn flat where her grip had ground it down, teeth marks prominent where she liked to bite down. She picked it up anyway, then put it down because the point was useless, then picked it up again. She went back to the monitor. The comment bubble waited: Too raw? She typed over the sentence before she could make a ceremony of not doing it.

I wanted to leave the room before I said something I could not take back. Touching the monitor, her thumb hovered on the period. The new sentence sat there in the middle of the page. More lines stretched the story and she just didn’t like the flow. Shoes together. Hands folded. No broken plates. No noise. Joanne swallowed toner grit. Her mouth had gone dry enough that her tongue clicked off her teeth.

“No,” she said aloud and typed her thoughts in the comment bubble.

The word came out too loud for the room which surprised her. Behind the dead sentence, on the second monitor, her own file stayed open. It was the manuscript she had started a few months ago, on which she seldom worked. For some reason, staring at it made her uncomfortable. She knew she procrastinated often, but she always made an excuse why she did that.

She looked back at the monitor. A Bed of Roses. The cursor blinked in the blank white field. Stuck at that chapter. The cursor blinked in a way that for some reason made her thumb throb harder.

“One sentence,” she told herself. She started typing, first the T key and then the H key which suddenly stuck down with a soft plastic tick. The word stretched into nonsense: Thhhhhhhhhhhhh.

“Come on” she complained. She pried the key up with the blunt pencil. The pencil slipped. Its flat red mouth skidded over her thumbnail and caught the cut. Blood marked the H key on the keyboard. Annoyed, she disconnected her laptop, stood up and headed back to the warehouse.

The printer gave a dry internal cough: DRAWER 2 OPEN. Drawer 2 was not open. Drawer 2 had not been open the last four times either. Annoyed, Joanne pushed back. The chair wheel caught in the cracked floor mat and shoved one chair arm into her thigh. A cramp jumped under the muscle. A strip of packing tape stuck to her cardigan cuff which snagged on the desk lip and snapped her wrist back.

For a second she sat there, held by cheap tape and cheap plastic. Then she tore the tape loose hair by hair. At the printer, Drawer 2 sat crooked by a thumb-width. She shoved it. It resisted. She shoved harder. The machine blinked at her.

“Print, you piece of junk!”

Nothing happened. She kicked the drawer with the side of her shoe. Seemingly, the printer accepted the violence and resumed. One page. Two. A third with the softened sentence. A fourth with the angry paragraph now missing its rigor. She took the pages back to the desk, but the bent binder clip slipped off the stack before she sat down. Paper fanned across the cracked mat, under the chair, against the trash can, over the coffee mug. The mug rocked. Coffee slapped over the rim and bled into page 213.

“Damn it!” She caught the mug before it fell. Her cut thumb left a red smear on the handle. Page 214 landed faceup beside the trash can.

The false sentence looked worse in print. Not safer. She thought about it and agreed it felt smaller. The woman on the page had gone quiet in the space of one line. Joanne bent to pick it up and her thigh cramped again. She put one hand on the desk edge until it passed. The deadline sheet tapped the wall. Tap. Tap. Tap.

Clean pass before morning. Her supervisor’s comment bubble still hung in the right margin, polite, yet straightforward. Can we make her more sympathetic? Joanne stared at the printed sentence until the words blurred at the edges. A fork paused over a dinner plate, only a flash, not a memory she wanted. A wrist in a lotion-bright sleeve. Someone’s old rasp saying something she could not catch.

She picked up the red pencil. The tip had nothing left. She used the flat side and dragged a thick red line through her edit. The paper buckled. The line went crooked. Her thumb stung where the cut opened wider. In the margin she wrote: Leave the plate. Then she restored the original sentence on the screen. Not to change the whole paragraph. She still softened the next two lines. She changed spit to said. She cut coward from the last clause. Her hand did that part quickly, almost gratefully, before she could stop it. But the plate stayed.

The printer clicked again. JAM — REAR ACCESS. Joanne closed her eyes. “The damn thing is possessed,” she muttered. She turned back to her laptop. The cursor on her novel blinked beside the ruined Thhhhhhhhhhhhh. She deleted it. The page went blank again. Her throat tightened around nothing useful. “No. Leave it,” she told herself. She did not know whether she meant the manuscript, the blank file, the jammed printer, or herself. It’s not as if there was anyone there to care. The fluorescent tube above her flickered and came back blue-white. Heat crawled under her collar. Toner dust gritted on her tongue.

She shoved back from the desk too hard. The chair wheel jammed in the cracked mat. Held. Skipped loose. The chair slammed into the storage crates behind her. Cardboard folded with a damp, tired sound. Joanne twisted around in time to see the bottom crate split open at the corner. Water-swollen submissions slid out in a gray fan. An inventory packet slapped the concrete. A hard dark shape followed, dropped spine-first, and cracked against the floor like a knuckle.

The lights hummed. The printer blinked behind her. A chill filled the air which made the hair on the back of her neck stand. Her mouth felt dry. Joanne crouched, one hand on the desk because her thigh still pulled. The fallen book lay half under curled manuscript pages, its leather warped dark and soft along the seam.

She reached for it before she had decided to. Her cut thumb touched the cover. The leather gave under her skin. It was wet.

* * *

The coffee reached Page 214 before Joanne did. It ran in a thin brown line across the concrete, picking up grit, touching the lower corner first. The page curled as if flinching. Her red pencil note sat faceup against the crushed crate flap. Leave the plate, she thought.

“No. It works,” she said aloud.

She dropped to one knee too fast. Pain snapped up through the joint. The old chair bruise in her thigh tightened and almost put her sideways into the shelving. She caught the upright with her bad hand. Blood smeared the metal.

The printer kept blinking from the workroom. REAR ACCESS. REAR ACCESS.} Green light, that was all. And it was no help whatsoever. A chill ran up her spine. The fluorescent tube over the storage aisle clicked and hummed and clicked again. Cold air now from under the loading dock door slid around her ankles while sweat stayed trapped under her cardigan collar.

\newline

Joanne pinched Page 214 by the dry edge and lifted it off the floor. Concrete grit clung to the back of it. The coffee had touched the corner but not the sentence.

“Come on.”

She tucked the page under her elbow and reached for the rest. Three sheets had gone under the bottom shelf. One lay half folded beneath the split crate. Another had plastered itself to a wet inventory label, the label’s black print bleeding through the paper in soft bars. Her thumb throbbed beside the nail. Paper dust sat in the cut. Blood had crept under the nail in a thin red hook and had darkened.

Don’t bleed on it, she thought, but then she did. A spot landed on the page she had just rescued.

“Don’t.”

She wiped her thumb on her cardigan hem. The wool grabbed the split. The cut opened warm. She put the thumb in her mouth, tasted toner, dust, metal, and pulled it out worse. The saliva made her thumb burn.

The book was still wedged under the collapsed box. She had dropped it when the wet leather made her cut hurt more. Spine down. Dark leather against gray concrete. Warped boards. Pale stress lines near the spine like cracks in old varnish. Swollen paper edges pressed tight, page to page, fat from damp. Damaged stock, she told herself. Misfiled. Probably rare enough to report, ruined enough not to matter tonight.

She reached past it for the manuscript. The crate seam sagged under her wrist. Cardboard collapsed like wet bread. A blackened staple at the torn corner caught her cuff and held. She tugged. The staple pulled the fabric tight and dragged her hand lower, into the damp crate mouth. “Of course.” She tried to twist free. The shelf bracket was bent inward; it scraped her knuckle and pinned the cuff harder. Inside the crate, swollen submissions shifted with a soft, rotten slide. The book moved a finger-width, then stopped.

Her phone flashlight, clamped between her chin and shoulder, dimmed. The aisle went gray.

“No. No.” She jerked her arm back. The staple scratched skin. One manuscript page skated away under the shelf track. She grabbed for it with her free hand, missed, and knocked the binder clip loose. The clip snapped open. Pages slid across concrete in a white fan.

Joanne sat back on her heel and coughed once, hard. Dust hit the back of her throat. For half a second there was the fork held above a clean plate. Then the lotion-bright wrist. A rasp of voice that did not become a word.

Gone. “Not now.”

She set Page 214 on top of an overturned box, weighted it with the red pencil, and the book came with the crate flap when she lifted. It dragged free with a wet grit sound and rolled onto its side, heavy enough to knock one manuscript sheet flat. She should have pushed it away with her shoe. She should have left it and saved the pages. Instead she picked it up. She forgot the leather was wet. Cooler. Slick at the seam. Her cut thumb slid along the paper edge and left a red crescent where the pages bulged.

Joanne froze with it balanced across both palms.

What are you?”

No answer. Well, she wasn’t really expecting one. She remained aware of the printer blinking. The light tube buzzing. The dock air moving under the door. She tried to open the front board.

No luck. She tried again. The swollen paper gripped itself, page glued to page. She wedged a fingernail under the top edge. The page bit her index finger with a clean little slice.

“Fine. Fine.”

She sucked the bead of blood off the fingertip, grabbed the red pencil, and used the flattened point as a lever. The first page peeled up in a slow, tacky strip. Ink that had looked dead and brown darkened where her breath fell across it. Just a damp waking a line. Then she started to read.

Record before speech. Joanne held still.

The words were cramped near the top margin, written in a hand too steady for the warped page. Below them, stains swallowed half the next line. She angled the phone light with her wrist.

Name the moon.

Her thumb slipped. Blood touched the lower edge. A second line came up darker near the gutter.

Name the stage.

The margin had a few small hooked marks. Carets. Deletions. Insertions. They weren’t hers, but close enough that her hand wanted to correct their spacing. At the bottom, untouched by damp or warp, one ruled line waited under a heading she had almost missed.

Draft correction.

Then, smaller: Clean hand. “Odd,” she said.

The book shifted in her lap. Its wet cover printed cold through her skirt. Joanne shut it too hard. Dust jumped off the nearest box.

The phone screen showed the time. Nine more minutes gone.

The printer still needed the rear access cleared. Page 213 was stained. Page 214 was marked, gritted, and now blood-touched. The clean pass was not clean. The book, she had picked up from the floor. The damaged-stock bin was across the room. They would ask why Joanne had opened it. The would ask why there was blood.

Joanne wiped the inventory label pulp from her palm. It only spread. “Just for now.”

She gathered the pages in a crooked stack, tapped them once against her knee, and made the stack worse. She slid Page 214 into the middle anyway. The red pencil went beside it. Then the book. It got caught and wouldn’t fit in the bag. One swollen corner caught in the zipper teeth. She pressed down with the heel of her hand until the leather gave and the zipper closed over it crooked.

Her thumb pulsed against the seam. Joanne turned off the storage light. The aisle disappeared behind her. In the dark, the book was only weight in her bag, knocking once against her hip as she walked back to her office.

At the desk, she opened the rear access with two fingers and the blunt end of the red pencil. The printer spat out the last pages with one corner browned and the red note buried in the stack. She uploaded the file before she could soften the plate again. The screen accepted CLEAN PASS FINAL. She chuckled to herself at the presumed lie.

She then turned the monitors off, left the rear panel half-latched, and took the bag with her.

* * *

The codex hit Travis’s entry table before Joanne could make it look like it was a careless mistake. One hard knock against the white-painted leg rang out and startled her. She froze with the strap still sitting on her shoulder. She swallowed with an audible gulp and the entire sequence made her feel slightly embarrassed. Were it not for her thumb which pulsed inside the tissue she had twisted around it in the parking lot, she would have blushed. She looked at her hand. The tissue had gone stiff at the first knot and damp at the pad.

Travis looked up from the counter. He noticed her wince and his expression changed to slight concern.

“Rough night?”

Joanne worked her mouth. Tried to speak. Nothing moved at first but she managed a barely audible: “Yeah.”

His shoes were lined up by the door, toes square to the baseboard. Her boots had left two gray warehouse prints on the mat and a third on the clean tile. She became aware Travis had cleaned the apartment which smelled of lemon spray. She looked over at the table. A plate waited under lifted foil, rice drying at the edges. Fork straight. Napkin folded. The gray couch throw lay folded into thirds over the armrest. The dishwasher hummed with a level, patient sound that made her jaw hurt. She watched Travis take his plate and drop it in the kitchen sink.

She got the bag off her shoulder. The codex dragged it down as if it were an anchor. Canvas scraped the table leg.

“I’m tired,” she said.

He didn’t say anything. She noticed his hand grabbed the faucet tightly and he let it rest on the tap a little long. Travis turned off the faucet.

Joanne tucked her thumb into her palm. Aware of how her words had come off she added: “No, I mean … not you.”

He dried his hands on a dish towel. Slow strokes between the fingers. “I didn’t say that.”

“I know,” she agreed as she met his eyes.

“I’m listening.” He waited.

“I know,” she said before she paused.

Joanne rushed to fill the awkward silence. “It’s work. The printer jammed, and there was this spill, and intake’s going to… “ She stopped.

…lotion-bright wrist. A cigarette rasp with no words attached. The warehouse printer coughing behind her.

Joanne shut her mouth. Travis waited with a curious look on his face.

“Forget it,” she said.

He came around the counter, enough so she could see all of him. Just far enough to make her aware of the distance left.

“Have you eaten anything?”

“I had coffee.”

“Jo.”

“What?”

“I made dinner.”

“I know.”

“Come on,” he said and waiver her over to her plate.

She bent for the bag. “Let me just put this somewhere.” The bag would not slide under the entry bench. Something inside caught at an angle. She pushed harder. The zipper teeth snagged on the warped leather corner and it stuck. Her thumb slipped against the pull. Pain shot up her hand.

“Damn it!”

Travis took a step. “What happened?”

“Nothing.” She tried to play it off as if it were of no consequence. Blood showed through the tissue in a dark bead. She pinched the thumb against her palm and yanked the zipper. It stuck harder. The bag sat crooked in the open, dirty canvas against clean floor.

“Jo. Let me see,” he pleaded.

“It’s fine.”

He walked closer. “Let me see it.”

She stood there with her hand half-hidden between them. He did not reach. The apartment went quiet. She registered the dishwasher hum. Inside the bag, the codex settled with a dull shift.

Snapping out of it, Joanne raised her hand and opened her fingers. Travis took her hand carefully. The care made her throat tighten before the pain did. He pressed the tissue down with his thumb.

“That’s not nothing.”

“It’s a cut,” she tried to dismiss it.

“From what?”

“Paper.”

His brow furled. “That much blood?”

“Bad paper.” She had hoped that bad joke would cut the tension. A small breath moved through him. Almost amusement. She thought his patience was running thin.

“You need to slow down,” he said.

Her stomach turned around the old coffee. “I’m not trying to make this a thing.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“I know.”

“But you came in like…”

“Like what?” Her voice harsh.

He looked down at her hand. Said nothing. She gave him one before he had to find it. “Forget it. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” she asked, annoyed at him.

“Make me the bad guy.”

The words were calm. Low. Defensible. Joanne pulled her hand back too quickly. The tissue stuck to his thumb for a second, then peeled away. Fresh blood shone in the cut.

“I’m not.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not blaming you.”

“Okay.”

The second one closed softer than the first.

On the counter, her water glass had left one wet ring on the spotless stone. She reached for it with an unsteady hand. She drank then set it down. The glass rocked, stopped, and left a crescent of water.

Travis looked at the ring. Joanne rubbed it with the side of her hand. “Sorry.”

“It’s a counter,” he said. “It doesn’t have feelings”

She let her gaze rest on him before she responded. “I know. But you do.”

He sighed through his nose, then took the napkin from beside her plate and wrapped it around her thumb with a clean fold. His fingers were warm. He tucked the end under once, tight enough to sting.

“There,” he said.

She smiled before she became aware of his touch. His hand dragged on her arm and then over her shoulder. His palm settled through the cardigan, careful, familiar, and intimate.

“Come here.”

She leaned in. He wasn’t pulling her towards him. She felt she needed to.

Joanne closed her eyes, head resting on his chest. She could hear that stupid dishwasher, and his heartbeat. She felt his shirt against her cheek. His hand stayed on her shoulder, the other one holding the small of her back until her breathing matched his. Then he let go, turned to the kitchen table and lifted her plate.

“I’ll heat it up.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I made dinner.”

The microwave door stuck on the first pull. He tugged it open with a plastic clack, slid the plate in, and pressed the same button twice. Yellow light filled the box. Rice turned slowly behind smeared glass. He then carried the hot plate back to the table.

Joanne sat. The chair legs scraped too loud under her weight. Travis nudged it back into line with his foot. She picked up the fork with her good hand. Her thumb throbbed under the napkin. The first bite tasted of salt, old oil, and warehouse dust still trapped at the back of her mouth.

He watched her trying to eat. “You okay?” he asked.

She looked at the bag by the bench. The zipper gap showed a sliver of dark leather. Am I?

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s fine. I’m good.”

Later, Travis slept on the couch with one arm over his eyes. The overhead light was off. The kitchen clock made a small electric buzz. The tied trash bag sat by the door, cinched tight but not taken out.

Joanne stood over her bag with the napkin still wrapped around her thumb. The zipper caught once. She turned angry at the zipper, which in her mind was the only thing that actively went out of its way to annoy her. She worked it loose without swearing aloud.

The codex came out heavy, wet, and cold, its warped corner scraping the table as she set it down.

Correction.

Clean hand.

Her spine shivered. She touched the edge with the napkin instead of her skin. The page opened easier than it had in the warehouse.

* * *