This story is taken from my upcoming book of surreal anecdotes and very short fairy tales for adults called "The Mundane Uses of Magical Objects"
She was the best actress in the world -- the star of the silver screen -- the sun of the golden stage. She was so exact, so convincing in disappearing into her characters that the imaginary world she created became more precise and real than the real world she lived in. And eventually the regular world had no reason to continue existing at all -- it was just a shallow reflection of the rich realities conjured up by her performances.
And so everyone and everything on the outside of her movies began to vanish -- consumed by the fiction. Even the theater disappeared because it was just too hard to keep suspending the disbelief when the curtains fell or the sets changed or the actors messed up their lines. And then the audience disappeared too because it was not necessary for the movie characters to live full lives. The audience's life was not nearly as important or multifaceted. And the writers were not necessary either because they were usually troubled confused people and just added static. And the person that the actress was outside of her characters was also no longer. Only the movies she already created remained.
But they didn't live stuck within the scripts and storylines already pre-written and pre-determined. The world within the movies changed and grew as the characters lived out the logical and illogical paths they started upon.
Eventually in some of these movies, the characters went to see movies. And then some of them decided to create movies of their own. Good actors appeared. And some time down the line -- the best actor emerged. The greatest actor of his generation!
He was so good that the characters he created were more real than the real him and the other people of the world outside his movie. And so that world began to disappear and only the world in his movie remained. Until there was an actress in one of the movies within that movie who became the best ever and created an even more convincing world destroying the previous one. And so it went until the next best actor...
If you like this story, you can check out another one here.