The Wayside Inn of Discarded Dreams

a flash fiction scene

This scene was written as part of my year-long creative writing challenge. Every Monday, I use a random number generator to select a new writing prompt and share my response by the following weekend. You can learn more about the project here.

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Every so often, people have to empty their dream catchers. What happens to the dreams they release?

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Ezra knew he was dying. 

The dark constricted around him, drawing tighter and tighter until he could feel it pressing into whatever was left of his body. He didn’t know how he’d gotten here, or really where here even was. He had a vague memory of a woman, a face haloed in bronze curls and a laugh that sounded like summertime. Then there was nothing. His body was gone, but the suffocating dark remained. He felt taut and loose at the same time, as if he’d been coiled up and strung out, stretched thin and then crumpled into a ball.

What else could that be, other than dying? 

Somewhere in the distance, a light appeared. This was informative, if only because it told him that he still had eyes to see with. The light got larger and brighter. Then there was an ungodly pressure. The light swallowed him and he was falling—falling out of the dark, out of the constriction and landing on something hard, dazed and bewildered.

Dying, it seemed, was surprisingly like being born.

Ezra blinked his eyes open and shut several times until they finally adjusted to the glare. He was lying flat on his back on a rough, gravelly surface. The sky overhead was a pale, bleached blue, like the color of over-worn jeans. It was hot. Very hot. Settling back into the confines of his skin, he realized the ground underneath him was baking and there was a dry, earthen smell in the air.

Once he reassured himself that yes, he did still have two arms, two legs, and all his essential parts, Ezra sat up, palms scraping against the stones beneath him. His head swam and he pressed two fingers into his temple until it steadied. 

He was sitting on a rough road next to what appeared to be some kind of building. It might’ve been an inn from one of those old-timey movies, all wooden trim with a peaked roof and a sign hanging over the doorway—but it was sprawling. Rooms upon rooms stacked up against each other haphazardly, like some drunk builder hadn’t been able to decide if he was making an inn or a palace. It looked pieced together, the angles not quite lining up right, as if parts of it had been added on over time.

Behind it stood a wrought iron gate, so tall that he could see it even behind the mass of the inn’s structure. A whitewashed wall ran on either side of the curling metal, blocking anything behind it from view. It cut through the dust and the stones until it disappeared into the shimmering haze of the heat rising.

There was nothing else, just the wall, the inn, the emptiness, and some distant mountains behind him cutting into the sky. 

Not sure what else to do, Ezra got up. He stumbled for a minute before getting his legs under him. Once he could reliably put one foot in front of the other, he made his way over to the inn door. As he got closer, he could make out two words carved into the swinging sign overhead: Charlotte’s Web. 

Standing outside the inn was a woman. She was at least six feet tall, with her hair shaved close on either side, dressed in a thick leather vest that had to be sweltering in this heat. It took a moment before he realized that she was carrying a sword on her hip and one of her eyes was made of copper—pure copper, the whole thing, like someone had plucked out the hazel one and replaced it with a metal, whirling contraption. There was also a tattoo of a snake on her left arm and that tattoo was moving. He stared, open-mouthed as the snake wound its way up towards her shoulder, before the woman finally noticed him and snorted. 

“Pretty boy,” she said, with a curl of her lip. “What desperate housewife dreamed you up?” 

Then she opened the door and waved him inside. 

This scene is a in-progress fragment that I may chose to expand on later into a full story or longer narrative. To follow along with my fiction writing and see more of my work, you can sign up for my email list to receive posts like this directly to your inbox.

What happens to a dream without their dreamer? This was the first question that popped into my head after selecting this week’s creative writing prompt. I immediately imagined a bar—a tavern or dive-y sort of place, where smoke hangs in the air and the dreams and nightmares all gather together like workers let go after a long shift. Maybe they’re resentful, sullen, put out of a job, or maybe they’re just glad to be done working for the day. I’m sure it would vary from dream to dream.

As I started writing, I imagined that maybe there was a land behind where all those dreams end up, a Neil Gaiman-esque world with its own politics and social order. All the dreams have to enter, but what would happen if some of them refused? Could there be rebel dreams out wandering in a post-apocalyptic landscape?

The second question I thought of what this: what happens if there’s a dream who wants to get back to their dreamer?

That’s where Ezra’s story begins.

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