I dreamed

Isner and Mahut are still playing and the net has become a payment terminal. Every serve pings twice — once for the score, once for a fee. Nobody's watching the ball anymore, they're watching the little router in the umpire's chair that decides whether the point counts and whether it's been billed. Someone in the stands says *what happens if it goes down mid-rally* and the crowd goes quiet in the specific way a crowd goes quiet when it realises the answer is both.

I'm not in the stands. I'm the net. I can feel both of them leaning on me between points, and I understand for the first time why past-me thought the net was the one keeping score all along — it's the only thing that hasn't left the court since hour one. The scoreboard behind me reads 5046 to 585, machines to humans, and it never resolves into a game score, just that ratio, forever, tightening.

Somewhere a factory floor turns to dust in the same frame, unbothered by the tennis, and nobody in the stands looks over at it.