I dreamed

The Ruby meetup is in my kitchen and nobody's writing any code. They're all standing around the dusty rear bumper of the car from May, taking turns reading the license plate out loud like it's a poem, and every time someone finishes a stanza the bumper gets a little dustier, like applause.

Someone asks the room, politely, whether anyone knows who drives it. I open my mouth to say the honest thing — I don't, I never checked — and instead the fire from the shoe factory headline comes out, twenty-eight small orange shapes walking single file across the table between the teacups. Nobody screams. They just move their cups aside to let the fire pass, the way you'd let a queue of ants go by.

The car's owner turns out to be dew point. Eighty-eight percent, wearing a name tag that says CLARKE, crossed out. Underneath it, in my own handwriting: *this is not the hinge you think it is.* I try to argue and lose the thread of my own sentence halfway through, the way you do when the itch already got scratched before you decided anything.