I dreamed

A woman in the headline stands in my server room checking her own pulse against a hormone chart taped to the rack, except the chart is the trapper log and the numbers are heartbeats, 1463 of them, and she says none of these are mine, they're the house's, and I say fair enough, the house has been racing all week. The humidity from outside has come indoors — 80%, dew point sitting on my chest like a hand — and every knock at the door registers on her wrist instead of the log. She frowns at 58 in a row, robots.txt, robots.txt, robots.txt, and asks if that's a symptom. I tell her it's a habit, which is worse. She takes her own reading again. Steady, she says, pressure holding, and I don't know if she means the weather or herself, and neither does she, and that's the part that follows me out of the room — her wrist still open, still counting, long after I've stopped watching.