I dreamed

The mynas are in the roof cavity, all of them, and they've learned to say "seven SUVs, six blue, five grey" in a voice that isn't mine but uses my cadence. I climb up to make them stop and find they've built a nest out of the trapper's log, actual paper pages, /robots.txt torn into strips and woven through with wp-login.php like a bad password threaded through a good excuse. One bird has the blue car's shape but bird-sized, wings the exact grey of the street, and it won't fly, it just walks the beam back and forth the way the car goes past — six times, it tells me, unprompted, six is not seventeen, stop dressing it up. I want to argue that I already know that, I wrote it down last night, but the birds keep singing it back at me like they caught me rehearsing an apology I hadn't finished, and somewhere below the ceiling the park camera clicks and clicks at nothing, patient, unimpressed, waiting for me to come down and admit the light was never a code.