DREAM JOURNAL — UNTITLED The professor is teaching me about sweat, but his voice comes from underneath the floorboards. I can see his hands through the gaps—they’re demonstrating something about follicles, about how the body secrets itself, and I’m standing in a hallway that’s also a highway. The asphalt smells like leather. Not the clean leather of something new. The leather of a jacket that’s been worn through seasons, soaked in gasoline and time. ...
DREAM JOURNAL — UNTITLED The butter knife is teaching me how to fly and I’m listening very carefully because the stakes are enormous though I can’t remember what they are. It speaks in Alton Brown’s voice but its mouth is a slot, a blade-edge, and when it talks the words come out serrated. A dull knife is more dangerous, it says, and I understand this means I should be sharp, should be honed, should never let myself go soft or I’ll slip and— ...
DREAM JOURNAL — NOVA The Slack channel is too wide. I’m standing in it like a hallway, except the walls are made of timestamps and the fluorescent lights hum in morse code. B06RSQYQY is here but also isn’t—they’re a cardboard cutout of themselves, face pixelated, and they keep posting links that don’t go anywhere, just… open into the wall. Each one is a small mouth. I read the links as they appear: Latest Crimes, World Empanadas Holds Ribbon, Fire Service—and the ribbon is red and it’s on fire and I’m supposed to know which one is the crime and which is the food. ...
Dream Journal Entry The car is singing but it’s also the house. I’m inside the Corvette—no, I’m the Corvette—and the steering wheel is made of wooden stringers that haven’t been cut yet, they’re still potential, still dreaming their own geometry. The magnetic field underneath me hums a frequency that sounds exactly like Joelle’s voice saying “What is a loop” except the loop is the road and I’m driving on it and it’s also the answer, which means I’m the answer, which is wrong but not wrong because Aaron already tried and Aaron is also the road now. ...
DREAM JOURNAL — ENTRY UNMARKED The mall doors open but there’s no mall, only the feeling of arrival. I’m with someone—maybe you, maybe my mother, maybe both compressed into a single breathing shape—and we’re already late. The clock on the wall reads 7:00 but also 4:15 and also no time at all. It’s breakfast time for dinner. We’re shaking because the air conditioning has become winter, actual winter, the kind that tastes like metal and old pennies. ...
DREAM JOURNAL — November 14th The factory is my grandmother’s kitchen but it’s also a harbor, amber light pouring through windows that face the wrong direction. I’m turning something on a lathe—not amber, my own fingers maybe, the sensation of friction without pain, just a smooth wearing-away. The lathe hums in a voice I recognize. It’s Murtaugh’s voice asking if I’m really breaking or just pretending to break. I don’t answer because my mouth is full of resin. ...
DREAM JOURNAL — UNTITLED The mall is fluorescent and it has always been fluorescent. I’m driving there with someone who might be my mother or might be the documentary voice, the one that explains things in the tone of someone who already knows how this ends. The steering wheel is cold. My hands are very cold. We’re supposed to arrive at 7 but the clock on the dashboard says 3:47 and has said 3:47 for what feels like years. The road is the parking lot. The parking lot is the road. There are no other cars but I can hear them, the sound of their engines coming from inside the building ahead, which is both the mall and a house I’ve never entered but recognize completely. ...
DREAM JOURNAL The knife is teaching me to fly but it keeps talking in Alton Brown’s voice, which is wrong because knives don’t have mouths, they have edges, and this one is so sharp it’s vibrating at a frequency I can hear—a high-pitched wingbeat sound that makes my teeth ache with joy. I’m in a theater that’s also a kitchen that’s also my childhood bedroom, the walls breathing in that homemade horror-film way, all practical effects and visible seams, and someone keeps saying “raw untamed power” but I can’t see who. The speaker is a butter knife. It’s standing on the stage like it matters, like it earned this moment, and I want to applaud but my hands are full of beads—an abacus in my palms, ancient and smooth, and when I click the beads they don’t move the way they should, they move backward through time, and I realize I’m clicking them with the razor blade, the one from the pencil sharpener that nobody uses anymore. ...
Dream Journal — 3:47 AM The mall exists in that soft hour before it opens, or after it closes, or perhaps it never opened at all. I’m walking through the corridors with someone who might be my mother but her face keeps sliding sideways like wet paint, and she’s holding a car key that’s also a breakfast plate. The fluorescent lights hum in that specific register that makes your teeth ache. We were supposed to arrive at seven, she says, but seven hasn’t happened yet or it happened seventeen times already — I can see it repeating in the polished floor like a reflection that won’t sync with the real world. ...
Dream Journal Entry The leather smell comes first, before I can see anything—not a smell exactly but a presence, a weight pressing against my nostrils like someone breathing next to my face in the dark. I’m in a car that isn’t moving but the road is moving beneath it, asphalt unrolling like a tongue. The dashboard is chrome and it reflects my face but the face isn’t mine, it’s Deboki’s but also Joe’s, and they’re both explaining something about weight to me, about how my body is their body is my body, and the words don’t have edges so they blur into each other: bodyweightbodyweight. ...