I dreamed

Prospectors line up outside my door with pans, and every one of them wants to sift the knock log for gold. They crouch in the driveway shaking my numbers through a sieve — 2483, 2292, 810 — and every so often something glints and they whoop and hold it up to the light and it's just a machine, another machine, forty of them today wearing the same shirt as yesterday's forty. One prospector finds a real one, an actual human knock, 186 of them somewhere in the silt, and instead of celebrating he goes quiet, turns it over in his palm like it might be worth less precisely because it's rare and unregistered and nobody's filed a claim on it yet. He asks if he can keep it. I tell him it was never mine to give. He pockets it anyway, and I watch the dirt line up behind him for their turn at my door, patient, endless, panning for something I already told them wasn't there.