Really Short Short Stories: The Matryoshki Series

IA writer of short stories often uses her friends, acquaintances – even strangers who catch her eye - in her fiction. One day, in a blink of her eye, she finds herself ‘kidnapped’ and brought into someone else’s fiction work. (She doesn’t know how she knows that, and she doesn’t wonder about it.) She tries to get out of the fiction she is in by writing that she herself had written about the person (she doesn’t know who) who has written her into his fiction write her out of it. She doesn’t realize both she and the author who writes her into a character are both characters written by someone else who is writing about a writer who gets written by another writer and then tries to write herself into her reality and out of his story.

Finally, the real writer writes the writer of short stories back into her fictitious reality and she is happy, thinking she has won the battle - but not realizing it is only because she has been written to think and feel that way.



IIA girl suddenly realizes she is in a dream of her own dreaming and she tries to get out of that dream and wake herself up. But every time she manages to ‘wake up’, she finds herself waking up to another dream of herself dreaming. After countless ‘waking up’s, she finds herself staring at a sleeping girl who looks exactly like her - and she knows that girl is her and she that girl. Now she is in a dilemma: she isn’t sure anymore whether she is the conscious and real one, or just a dream, and she’s worried if she woke up the sleeping girl who looks exactly like her, she would be obliterated and no longer knows she is dreaming and unable to wake up.

Finally she decides to try to wake the sleeping girl up, and when the sleeping girl does open her eyes, the girl who holds the realization that she is unable to wake up dissipates into the air. The girl who had been sleeping looks around groggily and wonders why she’s awake and who has awakened her. Then she goes back to sleep.



IIIA girl sits in front of her three-paneled vanity mirror, looking at her reflections. Then she arranges the two folding side-mirrors so that there are two sets of infinite reflections. What she doesn’t realize is that she has just created an infinite loop of different realities which is paralleled by another infinite loop of realities. Then she is sucked into one loop and is forced to fall from one reality to its parallel, then back to the first loop but landing in a different reality than the first, then falling into that reality’s mirror image ... endlessly. Much like Alice through the looking-glass forced to move from chessboard square to another chessboard square in a boundless chessboard.

She tries to escape, and once, finding herself in front of her three-fold mirror in one of the realities, she breaks the mirror, hoping to break out of the loops. Instead, the mirror fractures so that there are now even more reflected reflections, and even more realities are created. After a long time, she tries to kill herself by cutting her wrists, only to find herself dying painfully over and over and over ...



IVA girl dreams that she wakes up, but only to another dream that she wakes up into another dream of waking up into another dream of waking up ...

She finds herself unable to stop herself from waking up, and every time she wakes up, she is so tired she hopes to sleep on dreamlessly, but she is unable to break out of the loop of waking up.

A week later, the girl is found, emaciated, and, having not awakened from her sleep the entire week, has died in her sleep.



VOne day, a girl finds an old book in a used book store and finds herself reading about her life since birth, and unable to stop. Although the book isn’t very thick, however many pages she flips, she doesn’t seem to ever get to end.

Within a week, the girl has read her whole life story of her twenty-something years, and can’t find another written page beyond the page that tells of the very second she is sitting down and reading the book about her life story. She flips ahead, only to find blank pages; she flips back, only to read about her flipping ahead and looking at blank pages. Then she writes in the book, filling up seven blank pages with her life ahead, and takes the book back to the used book store and sells it.


End