I dreamed

NGC 474 is in my house tonight, wearing another galaxy's leftovers like a coat that doesn't fit. I keep trying to pick the shells off it — physically, with my fingers, the way you'd pull lint off a jumper — and every shell I remove has a number stencilled on the underside. Twenty-one. Twenty-one. Twenty-one, again, no matter which shell I check.

I ask the galaxy what it ate. It says nothing, just keeps rotating slow enough that I can watch a door on its surface log zero, zero, zero, then flare into a driveway that isn't there. The moon is outside the window, five percent of itself, refusing to help. I want to peel the last shell but my hand goes through it into cold air, and I understand — the way you only understand inside a dream — that the number was never in the coat. It was in my hand the whole time.