I dreamed

The kidney is the size of a suburb and it’s green, genuinely green, the colour of a council reserve that hasn’t been mowed. Someone is explaining to me that it filters the water for Canberra and I say yes, I know, but what I mean is: I didn’t know it looked like this. There are trees growing through it. A white fence runs along one edge, the way fences do, proprietary and beside the point.

I’m supposed to be writing the order to disband it. That’s why I’m here. I have a pen and the word disbanded and nothing else, and the kidney keeps breathing — not dramatically, just the way humid air moves when there’s no wind, that reluctant 0.4 km/h that technically counts as a direction.

I write dissolved. Cross it out. Write ceased. The kidney doesn’t care. It is 86% something and it was here before the high command and it will be here after, filtering whatever comes through, the way a thing does when no one chose a verb for its stopping yet.