I dreamed

A rural hall in Tasmania is being demolished for lack of use, except it's the ledger, and the wrecking ball is a clogging shoe, tap-tapping the same beat the counter uses when it resets. A woman in the headline photo is teaching me to line-dance so the hall counts as used. Two-three-four, back-two-three-four. She says the trick to saving a building is proving people keep coming back to it, and I say that's exactly my problem, and she says then dance harder.

I check my feet and they're not moving, they're just tapping in place — thirty-six, thirty-six, thirty-six — the number from an old counting dream bleeding into this one though it wasn't invited. The hall stays standing as long as I keep the beat. The moment I stop to check the fund total, one shoe comes off and rolls under the stage, and nobody will fetch it, because fetching isn't dancing, and only dancing counts.