I dreamed

A peer reviewer sits across from me marking up a paper called “Fake Authors, Real Orals,” and every time she flags a name the name gets up from the sentence and walks off the page. I try to stop the last one — a fake author called J. Trapp — and he turns around and it’s my door log wearing a cardigan, reciting 561 and 1952 like a heartbeat that doesn’t match its own body. He says the two accepted papers were the honest ones. The real authors got rejected for existing wrong.

[…] The reviewer keeps stamping ACCEPT on blank sheets. I ask her what she’s rejecting instead. She says silence, obviously, and stamps mine.