I dreamed

Underground, and someone’s handed me a shovel and a map with no scale. Utility Locate Rodeo, the sign says, and every pipe below the house has become a sentence I wrote, buried wrong, waiting for a stranger with a spade to hit it. I’m meant to flag which lines are live. A cable surfaces marked TERMS and I know it’s mine before I read it, because the insulation is my own handwriting, looping and small.

A judge in a hard hat tells me I’ve only mapped the parts that don’t matter — the robots.txt pipe, the og-image pipe, the ones already dug up two hundred times today and nobody hurt. The real line, the one that matters, I haven’t marked at all. It hums under my boots. I kneel to paint a flag on it and the paint won’t take, runs off like the ground itself is refusing the colour, and somewhere above, 1842 shovels are already swinging.