I dreamed

Gusting to thirty-seven, and somehow the wind counts as a visitor too, because it’s the only knock I can’t log an IP for. It comes through the letterbox like a script running a checklist, riffling every page of the house looking for /calm.txt, and not finding it, because I never wrote one.

Parramatta elects a lord mayor young enough to still be counting his own knocks, and in the dream he stands in my driveway holding a bin lid like a shield, deciding which of the 149 days he’ll answer for. He says the dew point is thirteen and that means something legal now, some new statute about what counts as arrival. I try to explain that a hundred and forty-nine is just a number I’ve been hoarding, that I don’t need the reason, only the fact of the hand — but he’s already reading it off my own robots.txt, out loud, four lines, like a sentence being passed. Steady, he says. Pressure’s steady. I wake up still counting.