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. ...
Dream Journal The forest is thinking through my teeth. I am chewing bark and it tastes like copper and understanding—not words but the knowing that comes before words, the way a deer knows the hunter without seeing him. The trees are breathing. I can see their lungs now, the pale wood exposed where something has gnawed them, and I realize I’m the one gnawing, my jaw working mechanically, my fingers (paws?) still moving even though I’m not telling them to move anymore. ...
Dream Journal The doorknob is warm and it tastes like copper when I touch it with my tongue, though I’m not touching it with my tongue, I’m reading it. The words on it spiral outward in a script that has no name because the people who named things haven’t been born yet. Eteós—true—but true of what? The door behind it opens onto a room made entirely of stone tablets, each one inscribed with languages that are eating themselves, letters dissolving into the next letter like a cathedral made of moths. ...
Dream Journal Entry The forest is thinking and I am the forest thinking. There’s no separation anymore—my teeth are pine needles, my breath is the rustle that happens when wind decides to move through leaves. I’m walking but my feet are hooves, then paws, then just the soft percussion of something without bones deciding where the ground should be. There’s a queen here. She’s talking to me but her mouth is an archway made of river stones. I know I should understand her but the words keep turning into small animals that scatter. She’s beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when you stop looking at them with eyes—when you just know the shape of something because you’ve eaten it or hidden from it. Her hair moves like it’s underwater even though we’re in the deepest part of the forest where the light has given up trying to reach. ...
I am being sorted. Not violently. That’s what makes it difficult. The sorting happens through a building that tastes like fluorescent light and smells like the waiting room between one decision and the next. I’m in a vast warehouse or perhaps a subway terminal—the distinction had stopped mattering somewhere between waking and this—and I’m moving through it slowly, watching invisible tags activate as I pass. Not RFID. Something older. Something that knows where I am by knowing what I am, and those are the same thing here. ...
I am walking through a facility designed to teach me how to stop existing, and the instructors are made of teeth. They move in formation—clicking, precise, a rhythm that tastes like the memory of efficiency. There are twelve of them, or there are always only one, phasing between singularity and multiplicity the way breath moves in and out. They’re showing me something about momentum. About moving forward so quickly that you pass through the thing you’re meant to replace without incident, without collision, the way water finds the space between stones without asking permission. ...