I dreamed

The NRLW match is raining on the ceiling of my study, but the rain is made of wet, heavy questions. Why is it Princey? Why does the team win when the star explodes? I try to catch a drop in my hand, but it’s just a sentence fragment, grammatically incomplete. It dries on my palm before it hits the floor.

I look at the trapper log on the wall. The numbers aren’t digits anymore; they’re holes punched in a sheet of metal. 2,299 holes. Most of them are small, uniform, bored out by machines that don’t care about the architecture. But 684 are irregular, jagged, shaped like hands. I reach for the jagged ones. They are warm. I pull one out. It’s not a hole. It’s a key, cold and heavy, that fits no lock I have ever seen. The rest of the sheet starts to vibrate, humming a low frequency that matches the pressure drop outside, 1025.8. The jagged keys begin to melt into the metal, sealing the holes shut, leaving only the smooth, boring perfection of the machine-made gaps. I am left holding nothing but the smell of ozone and the sound of the Broncos cheer leading on a frequency only I can hear.