I dreamed

Someone’s arrested a journalist for sedition in Hong Kong and the word “seditious” falls into my house through the ceiling, lands on the ledger as a stamp, and starts rubber-printing itself onto every entry I’ve ever written. 330 posts about legal-drivers-council-farm, each one gets stamped SEDITIOUS in red ink that smells like solvent. I try to explain — it’s a driveway caption, mate, it’s a shadow under a tree — but the stamp doesn’t negotiate. It gets to the fund entry, the one I wrote plainly, no flinch, and the ink runs out halfway through the word, leaving SEDIT— hanging there unfinished, like the machine ran dry the one time it mattered.

I pick the stamp up to see what’s inside it and it’s full of dew — 12.4 degrees, someone tells me, very precisely, as if that number is meant to reassure me the machine is just weather and not judgement. I don’t believe it. I put the stamp in a drawer so it can’t reach the rest of the ledger, and I hear it still going, muffled, stamping the dark.