“Sweet dreams, Tiger.”

I open my eyes and stare at the ceiling above my bed. Why had Mum’s mantra from my childhood bedtimes entered my head? I roll over, sprawling an arm across Annie’s deserted side of the bed, a stark reminder she’s no longer here to help answer my questions. I roll back onto my back and self-analyse my thoughts.

This is the opening paragraph from Bedtime Stories, a short story I shared on the Tall And True writers’ website in May 2025.

Please note: There are spoilers in the Story Insight below.

Story Insight

I wrote Bedtime Stories for the April 2025 Furious Fiction writing challenge run by the Australian Writers’ Centre’s, and it and it was my sixth April entry for the challenge since my first in 2020, A Song on the Radio (on Tall And True). The Writers’ Centre’s brief for this April’s challenge was:

• Each story’s setting had to be a BED.
• The first sentence had to contain only three words.
• And the story had to include the words SHAPE, ENTER, and QUESTION. (Longer variations were acceptable.)

My opening line, “Sweet Dreams, Tiger”, and the setting with my protagonist tossing and turning in bed, reflecting on childhood memories of his mother reading him bedtime stories, came to me quickly.

I drew on some of my favourite memories as a parent, reading to and with my son, before he became an independent reader, and then hit his non-reading teenage years. (I wrote about this in the Bedtime Stories and Teenage Readers blog post in 2018.)

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Writing Choices

I also wove two more relationships through the story for my protagonist: with his father, who played a “background role” in his childhood; and his former partner, Annie, who leaves him as he becomes more like his silent, scotch drinking father after his mother’s death.

Annie is the only character I named in the story. Mum and Dad didn’t need first names for their roles, and the protagonist’s nickname, Tiger, was perfect for the “sweet dreams” effect I hoped to achieve with the story.

I tossed around two titles: “Bedtime Stories” and “Sweet Dreams, Tiger”. I submitted the entry to Furious Fiction with the former, but afterwards wished I used the latter. However, in sharing the story on Tall And True, I tweaked the closing sentence, and stuck with the original title.

Another Longlisting!

I’m proud to say that Bedtime Stories made the longlist for the April 2025 Showcase on the Writers’ Centre website.

A fitting reward for my sixth April Furious Fiction!

© 2025 Robert Fairhead

Thanks to Pexels for sharing the children’s bookcase image for this story on Pixabay. I loved reading Dr. Seuss’s “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!” to my son.

N.B. You can read Bedtime Stories on Tall And True. You might also like to read my February 2025 longlisted Furious Fiction story, The Seven Deadly Sins.