"Fiction"
All he could remember was that it existed. It was a scrap of something, a fragment. Little more than a paragraph or two. Written by a famous man, perhaps in German, and concerning a dream. In the dream, the dreamer was writing something, but none of the words were legible, appearing more like glyphs, or cuneiform. At one point, this dreamer spilled the inkpot, and there immediately leaked into the room a sound of disembodied, hooting laughter.
He scoured the Internet, using all the tools at his command. He up-ended the drawers of his chats with erudite accomplices, searching for key phrases and words. Despite the words appearing in various contexts, the story could not be found.
Did it exist? All day, it worried at the edges of his mind like mouse-teeth on fraying carpet. When he got home that night, his lover was waiting for him. "Did you get milk?"
He had forgotten. "I'm sorry," he said.
His lover turned away from him in a huff. This was the final link in a long chain of memory-lapses. "You're not yourself lately," his lover said.
"I'm sorry," he said again. His mouth felt frozen, as if that was the only thing he could say.
From the next room, there came a laugh, a derisive hooting, like that of a disconsolate bird, or an unwelcome guest.