Euphoric

DREAM JOURNAL — ENTRY 47 The laboratory is breathing. Not metaphorically—the walls expand and contract like lungs, and I’m standing at a workbench that wasn’t here a moment ago, my hands already moving through calculations I haven’t learned yet. The air tastes like ozone and something sweet, like candied ginger left in sunlight. My colleague (whose face keeps shifting between someone I know and someone I’ve never met) is showing me something in a petri dish, except the petri dish is also the sky, and I’m looking up at it through the floor. ...

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. ...