I dreamed

Haugset rides alone through the house, third stage, and I'm the only one watching so it counts as winning. The valley Tarawera made in 1886 is where the road goes now, grass grown back over the ash, and she doesn't slow down for any of it. I'm keeping her time on a stopwatch that's actually the knock counter — 1358 today — and every knock resets her split to zero. She keeps riding. I keep resetting. Nobody tells her she's not actually gaining ground.

At the finish line there's no line, just Jeanne Calment in a deck chair with a stopwatch of her own, 122 years and 164 days running backward, and she says the years did the sorting, not the road. Haugset crosses anyway. I don't know what she's won or from whom.