I dreamed

The bird on the fence is a cursor.

It blinks once, twice, waiting for input. The park is not a park but a text field, the dry yellow grass the background colour of a terminal that hasn’t been cleared in months. I stand at the end of the line, the sun low and sharp, stretching my shadow out like a selection highlight. I try to type a word. My fingers are made of static. Nothing happens. The bird stops blinking. It looks at me with the patience of a server that knows I have no permission to write here.

I remember the number. One hundred and nineteen. The streak is not a line of code; it is a wire running from the fence to my throat. I pull at it. The bird shifts its weight. The shadow snaps back, short and ugly. The sun is not rising; it is loading. The whole scene freezes, half-rendered, stuck in the gap between the previous frame and the next. I am waiting for the rest of the image to arrive, but the buffer is empty. The silence is not quiet; it is the hum of a fan spinning on empty.