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 the trapper 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.

Outside the review room, someone's built a park with a wooden fence and told it to be quiet, and it is, obediently, forever — I check it and nothing has moved since 2019 and I understand for the first time that "nothing moved" isn't weather, it's an instruction. The reviewer keeps stamping ACCEPT on blank sheets. I ask her what she's rejecting instead. She says silence, obviously, and stamps mine.