Well it might not be quite as long as the books I wrote in high school, I took an introductory fiction workshop and wrote this short story as a sort of commentary of 2025 internet culture in a (hopefully) whimsical way.
“Hellooo! You’re next in line can you fucking move?” a woman in a pantsuit shouts from behind her as she remains entirely oblivious, scrolling through TikToks on her light gray and pink Meta glasses while she talks to one of her roommates on the phone about who would be on their betrayal lists. When she finally gets an ad she looks up to notice that it's her turn to order.
“Hi, welcome in, what can I get for you today?” The barista in a green apron decked out in pins asks from behind the counter.
“Could I get a large, iced, matcha latte with unsweetened almond milk and sugar free vanilla?” She responds, scrolling through the comments on a viral video as she orders.
The barista checks the screen in front of them and looks back up at the woman, “We’re out of sugar free vanilla syrup, would regular vanilla syrup be ok?”
“Uhm,” she hesitates, nervously fidgeting with the charms dangling off of her canvas tote bag strap, “do you guys have any other sugar free syrups?”
“We don't unfortunately.”
“No syrup for me then.”
The two of them finish the transaction and as she pays something catches her eye through her glasses, “Omg! is that a pink basketball pin on your apron? That totally reminds me of this dream I had a few months ago where I was back in college and my sorority sisters and I had, like, a laxative party before a basketball philanthropy event with this frat that was, like, known for only liking super skinny girls so obviously we wanted to look really skinny for it and during the philanthropy event this sister that I had, like, major beef with shit her pants so bad that it, like, shot her in the air and she made the basket. God it was so funny, I woke up almost pissing myself laughing, ironic, right?”
The barista doesn't respond, as if locked in a trance. As they recap of the dream subsides, they slowly snap out of it, seeming disoriented as to where they are and wordlessly handing the receipt to the woman, who walks to the other end of the counter to wait for her drink, laughing obnoxiously at every video that comes up on her glasses, not noticing the annoyed looks from other coffee shop patrons.
“Some of us are trying to actually get into the studio. Can you move the hell over? I need to clock in.” A yoga instructor with a mat in one hand and an iced coffee in the other yells at the woman with an annoyed look on her face. Her target doesn't hear the request, blocking the only unlocked door to the fitness studio with her face inches from her phone, typing away at a group chat with her friends in deep concentration as she giggles along with every new ping her phone receives.
After she finishes drafting her text back, she takes a sip of her barely touched drink and enters the pilates studio, still unaware of the anger stewing within the yoga instructor, who enters behind her, only to be reamed out by her boss for being late.
At the back of the studio, right inside the door of her reformer pilates class, her instructor, with a real, bright, smile on her face, holds out a tray to everyone who enters her class. “Would you like to try one of my dark chocolate peanut butter oatmeal bars?”
The woman’s broad smile falters, reaching for the charms on her bag strap once again, “do u know how many calories they are?”
Without missing a beat, the instructor responds, her smile still beaming, “I don't, but I made them at home with healthy ingredients. I just wanted everyone to have a little treat for my birthday class!”
“Oh, then I’m ok,” she responds immediately switching topics, “but that reminds me of this dream I had when I was freshly post-grad. My roommates and I had ordered out from this one salad place for, like, every meal because we were terrified of cooking for ourselves and burning down the house. So I went to bed one night and, like, in the dream my roommates and I decided our first thing we would cook would be brownies and we replaced the sugar with apple sauce to, like, lower the calories. But then when we took them out of the oven we were back in our sorority house and the brownies, like, transformed into these, frankly awful, like so bad you would rather starve, protein bars our sorority used to give us the week of our formal as, like, meal substitutions so we could look skinny in our dresses and I was disgusted when I saw what our brownies had turned into that I took a step backwards and fell off a cliff into a, like, never ending dark hole that didn't go away until I woke up. Happy birthday by the way!”
The woman walks to her preferred reformer in the front, left corner and gets herself all set up, sliding her Meta glasses back over her eyes and queueing up a new video podcast episode from one of her favorite influencers. The instructor stands with her tray of treats as her eyes are glazed over; the other class goers look at her in confusion until she comes out of her trance and places a smile back on her face before she moves to the front of the room to start the class. As the class begins, the woman ignores the instructor, barely doing the workout while erupting into periodic bouts of laughter at the video.
“It’s too crowded for you to be acting like this on the goddamned sidewalk, move!” A passerby crossing the street roared as she remained entirely oblivious. A loud chart topper was blaring through her large headphones, as her pastel, clad in a matching lounge set that stood out in the sea of dark suits and dresses during morning rush hour. She also missed a cacophony of other noises: whistles of others hailing yellow taxi cabs, the constant honk of drivers with road rage, and an older businessman behind her yelling into his ear piece about quarterly financial reports and budget cuts.
Her mask of blissful ignorance and her smile fell as if to accept her fate. She looked straight ahead and a man’s eyes locked in on her, something she couldn't ignore with her headphones on. The street interviewer stood, his cameraman opposite to him with a compact camera similar to the one her roommate had that she would beg to take photos on. The interviewer’s surgically altered smile shined in an unsettling way as he subtly shoved his tiny handheld microphone in the woman's direction.
There was no escape.
With a huff and a shrug of her tote bag higher up on her shoulder that caused all of her bag charms to knock against each other, she inched closer to the staring duo, sliding her large headphones around her neck so they tangled in with the long hair that splayed down her back. She remained tense and uncomfortable as her feet clicked to a stop on the gum-laden sidewalk in front of the two men, both around the woman's age and almost identical with matching bed-head, t-shirts with intentional holes and baggy jeans, torn at the bottom, covering their legs.
Without much warning, the cameraman counted down and the tell-tale sound of a recording starting pinged through the air, “this is street interviews and today I am here with…” He pointed the microphone in the woman's direction as a prompt for her to respond but she stayed silent, unwilling to participate. The silence stretched on as the bustling sounds the woman couldn't hear before roared around them. Refusing to allow his interview to fail, the interviewer's unnaturally white smile kicked up a notch, and he gave a forced chuckle, “well, today's topic is, what is the craziest dream that you have ever had?”
Her pink cheeks, packed heavy with an influencer's blush, tipped up, and the beaming smile from her earlier blissful ignorance returned. “How much time do you have?” The woman asked. The interviewer opened his mouth to respond but she kept talking before he had a chance to, “That was a rhetorical question. Now that you asked, there's no escape. I've already talked about my dreams twice today and it's not even nine!”
Asking the interviewer to hold the almost milk colored iced matcha in her hand, the woman popped a hip and let one of the straps of her tote bag fall down her arm. Her fingers reached into her bag and fumbled around inside. A moment of recognition flashed on her face when her hand wrapped around an item in the bag. The charm-filled wrist-chain jingled as she pulled an iPad with a sparkling case out and unlocked it, beginning to scroll through an app full of handwritten pages.
“My friends are always telling me that my dreams are some of the craziest things they’ve ever heard. I always send them 10 minute long voice memos in the morning recounting everything I can remember from all the dreams I had that night. That wasn't enough for me, though, so I started writing them down on my iPad,” which she shook in the air, “because I didn't want them to get lost in our constantly spammed group chat. Let me try to find a juicy one!” The woman laughed as she broke into a little shimmy with the last sentence and continued to scroll through the pages. She barely gazed at some and read the entire dream on others before shaking her head. Her face screwed up as she had almost scrolled to the end with no luck.
The interviewer and the cameraman still patiently waited, condensation beginning to soak the man’s hand that held the woman's iced matcha.
“Ah here it is! This was the one I was holding out for.” The woman exclaimed after she read one of the final pages, holding her pink text-laden screen up to the camera with a beaming smile. As she prepared to recount her dream, she grabbed her matcha back and took a large swig from her disintegrating paper straw.
“Ok so let me set the scene, basically, the dream starts in kind of, like, a cabin campground on the edge of the woods but, like, the ‘cabins’ mirror hotel rooms you would see at, like, a two star hotel off the side of of a highway, very yellow and dated and there is definitely no free fancy breakfast. Anyways, my roommate and I were living, like, all the way at the end of the, like, campground, I guess, right next to the forest and, like, right behind our place was, like, a rugby pitch where people were always playing. We weren't renewing our lease for next year, because the place was so shitty. Like, it's important that I emphasize how shitty this place is, like, so gross you couldn't even rent it if it was in Manhattan. But like basically we had a bunch of people coming on tours to our place and interrupting everything that we tried to do.
Every. Single. Time. The tours came by both of us were, like, ‘Ugh! This is so annoying. These people keep disrupting our peace.’
But then, one day, the two of us come back from our classes, because, like, in the dream world we were still in college and didn’t live in the city as we do now, and, like, our beds and bedding and pillows, and all that stuff was still there but, like, other than that the cabin, or hotel room, whatever you want to call it, has been completely turned into, like, an asphalt plot of land with none of our decor or our closets or any other furniture. I, like, got home first and I called her to tell her that they destroyed our apartment, and instead of us being mad that all of our stuff was gone we were both, like, laughing. Which is such an us thing to do, our neighbors hated how loud we were. Well, they hated other things about us too but they really hated how loud we were.
We kept saying to each other, ‘did they really have to show our apartment to a bunch of people and disrupt our peace if they were just going to demolish everything?’ You would think we would at least get an email that they were gonna bulldoze where we live.
We, like, wallowed in our annoyance for a little bit through the laughter but then we saw a flyer on a telephone pole outside our plot of land, that was, like, advertising a dinner party at a random apartment and it said that everybody was welcome so we decided to trek to the city, unfortunately the part of how we got there got completely lost to my subconscious. But, like, I would assume that we just walked. I mean I don’t even know why we went to this dinner party because throughout my college years I was, like, only eating lunch and would never even think about going to someone's house where I don't know what fatty shit they put in their food, but, whatever, it doesn't really matter. So, we finally found the apartment and it's a massive walk up to get to the top floor of the building, and I do not do cardio. Hello, I'm a pilates girl for a reason. We walked up a bunch, like, a bunch, of steps to get to this top, like, landing area and it's so damn hot up there that the two of us were sweating in our matching sweat sets. And yes, the fact they’re matching is important, I would not leave the house in unmatched loungewear.
When we were coming up the stairs, we weren't the only people that were coming up. This, like, short, old, masculine looking–ok more, like, lesbian looking–woman also came up the stairs at the same time as us and the woman who opened the door after we knocked, immediately recognized the woman that we came up with but, obviously, we don’t know her and she doesn’t know us. She still, though, let us into her house and once we got into the house it felt like everybody was doting on us in a really weird way, IDK I can’t explain it. There were a bunch of sweet old ladies standing by the entry way in the, like, foyer of the apartment that kept giving us those, like, yellow wrapped butterscotch candies out of their purses. Which, yum, by the way. They were also calling us family and we shrugged and went along with it even though we knew that we were not meant to be there even though the flyer said everyone was welcome.”
The woman takes a deep breath and another sip of her iced matcha, causing both men to confusingly step out of the dreamlike state they were in. Before she began to speak again the interviewer tried to put a stop to this, “that's all the tim–”
She ignores him and resumes speaking, “But the funny part comes next, don’t worry. Ok, so I went into the kitchen of this apartment and who did I see getting grapes from the fridge? My gg-big from my sorority, like, wow, small world, I guess. By the way, she was so mean to me and my big when she realized that we were closer than her and my g-big. But, like, I assumed that this must be, like, her family party and I was in my head saying, ‘it's fine now because I know her, so it won't be awkward anymore.’
This house was still feeling, like, really really hot and my roommate started freaking out and going, like, ‘I'm overheating in this sweatshirt, we have to leave, like, I'm uncomfortable, we need to leave.’ And she's like flapping her hands trying to cool herself down like a maniac.
I responded and I was, like, ‘we’re fine, calm down. You’re wearing a shirt underneath your sweatshirt, just take off your sweatshirt and you will be fine.’
And when I told her about this dream she was, like, ‘OMG! Me overheating and saying we need to leave is totally something I would do.’
I left my roommate, like, sitting down on a bench in the kitchen, I guess, to, like, go to the bathroom. Sorry, that part also got lost to the subconscious. But I do remember that when I went back into the kitchen it was completely full, which was not what it was before I left, and, like, everyone was sitting around multiple tables and it looked, like, the way it was set up, was, like, the dining room from my sorority house. The second I entered the kitchen I saw one of my uncles randomly sitting at one of the other tables but for some reason in the dream I didn't say hi to him. Maybe because he’s my creepy uncle. I guess that the table looking like my sorority house where we never ate and everyone staring at me like it was middle school and my creepy uncle being there after what happened at Thanksgiving last year was supposed to mean something but like I don't know, sorry, so so not the point of the story. That part is probably not even important, just my brain making connections to things that don't exist. But, anyways, I went back to where my roommate was sitting and where she had saved a seat for me and who else was sitting at our table but the former vice president of the United States and the producer of the song I was listening to, like, right before I went to bed that night, and OMG! That song I was listening to is, like, my favorite song of all time. I couldn't believe it.
It was crazy!
My brain immediately cuts to something else after that realization, similar to a movie cut scene, and suddenly I was in the back of my mom’s old car and she was in the front seat and I told her what happened at the dinner party and who I was at the table with.
She was, like, ‘who is that?’
My jaw dropped open at that because, like, how do you not know who that is? He, like, invented pop music, I was seriously considering disowning my mom at that point.
One last part, I promise, this dream doesn't go on forever, I swear. But, eventually, me and my roommate made it back to our, like, living area and my mom was also suddenly nowhere to be found. She wasn't the one who drove us home from the party, either, This was, like, a completely different event. This time when we came back all the trees around the plot were dead, like how trees look during the winter but it wasn't winter.
I wish I remembered more of this dream than what I wrote down so I could go into more detail for you because it was truly whiplash to experience while I was asleep. But… yeah, that's basically my craziest dream.”
When she finally stopped rattling on, the cameraman and interviewer, still both holding their equipment to attention, snapped themselves out of the hypnotic numbness that they had entered. As they shook themselves back into full consciousness, the woman put her iPad back into the overflowing bag and tossed her finally empty iced matcha into the trashcan, sans trashbag, mere inches from where they had been standing for who knows how long.
The sky outside was a washed out midnight blue, empty of stars due to the immense light pollution coming from the buildings that lined the deserted streets. They were a far cry from morning as the road markings that distinguish the lanes were all that could be seen. The sidewalks were lined with more decade-old gum than people at this hour. In fact, the only people seen for miles were the group of three standing next to a trashcan for a street interview. The sounds of people hailing taxicabs, drivers with road rage, and businessmen yelling about things that they deem important were no longer present.
This lack of other human presence didn’t phase the woman at all as she continued to beam at the camera that stopped recording hours ago because the camera ran out of storage. “That was so fun! Maybe all street interviewers aren't leech sucking jerks who try and rage bait the people they lure in front of their camera!” She continues with the utmost positivity, “And please tag me in the video when you guys post it. I'm hoping that sleep doctors will go into the comment section and tell me what my dreams mean.”
The two men stayed frozen in place as the woman picked her headphones up off of her collarbone and turned them back on. She slid the glittery covers over her ears and looked down at her phone to choose a song, the sound of the same teeny bopper pop star from earlier starting to play through its speakers. Grabbing her Meta glasses back out of her bag she turned on her heel and with one last wave, continued to dance and lipsync down the street, doing who knows what on her glasses.