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 [redacted] 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.