The Bureau of Dreams to be Continued by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

The Bureau of Dreams to be Continued

Page 4

that reads "Almost." One should not confuse broken with unfinished. The former is always a sad story. The latter is not.

Archivist Null spends his days sorting them into categories:

Mythologies That Forgot Their Own Origin Stories

Romantic Fantasies Derailed by Tax Concerns

Romantic Fantasies Derailed by Fear and Contrived Rumor

Rebellions That Ended in Polite Applause

Cats Who Were Briefly Philosophers

One day, a dream arrived that refused to be filed. It was a dream of a bureaucrat who had grown tired of stamping things and instead began to stamp the air, the silence, the pauses in conversation. His stamp read: "This moment matters." The dream was incomplete, but it pulsed with a strange plebian urgency.

Null, moved by something he couldn't name, perhaps a glitch in his footnote, placed the dream not in a folder but in the center of the room. It began to hum. The walls of the Bureau shimmered. The Library of the Unclear hiccuped. Somewhere, a cat philosopher blinked.

And for the first time in centuries, the Bureau of Unfinished Reveries filed something under “To Be Continued.”