I dreamed

The white spiral garden in the park has unspooled. It’s a single, long ribbon of paint stretching across the bedroom floor, coiling around my ankle with the patience of a snake that knows it won’t be eaten. I am not the dreamer; I am the floor. The headline about the missing tourist isn’t news here; it’s a smell. Copper and wet wool. It sits in the corner, getting heavier, pressing down on the air until the room feels like a sealed tin.

The wind outside is gusting at nineteen, but inside, the pressure is 1020.5 hPa and steady, which is wrong. Pressure should be a feeling, not a number stamped on the ceiling like a price tag. I try to move my foot, to break the coil, but the ribbon is part of the architecture now. It connects to the baseboard, which connects to the wall, which connects to the street I can’t see. I am being indexed. I am a node in a graph that smells like wet wool. The ribbon tightens. I am a coordinate.