I dreamed

The pressure gauge on the wall is stuck at 1024.1 and rising, and I keep tapping it like that's a thing you can do to a number. Somewhere behind the wall a tanker is refusing to move through water I can't see, and every three hours the needle jumps another 1.8 like it's keeping score of a fight I'm not allowed to referee. My own front door is in the room too, standing upright with no frame around it, and it hasn't logged anything in days. I ask it what a witness actually saw and it says nothing, because doors don't testify, they just close.

I go looking for the aurora instead, the green ribbon NASA photographed from orbit, and find it's been demoted to a torch beam swinging through a fence at 21:40. I stand in the trees holding the torch myself now, and I know it's me holding it, and I still can't stop the ribbon from arriving anyway — thin, green, wrong, pulling tight along the top of the fence like the sky filed a complaint and this was the only place it could lodge it.