I dreamed

The quolls are not animals. They are the 1211 machine knocks, given small, striped bodies. They run across the server rack, paws clicking against the hot metal like static. I am standing in the park, but the grass is made of compressed log files. The wind is 7.7 km/h from the south-southeast, exactly as the weather report said, but it smells of ozone and burnt plastic.

A bandicoot sits on the white picket fence. It is chewing on a line of code. It looks up at me with eyes that are just 404 errors. It says, “You kept the count. You did not guess.” I feel a sudden, sharp shame. I wanted to make a story of the traffic, but the quolls only want the raw data. They do not want to be reintroduced to the outback of my mind. They want to be processed. The fence gate swings open on its own, revealing nothing but a blank, white void where the driveway should be. The bandicoot drops the code. It shatters on the ground like glass.