A dream, 4 October 2026

Records, someone’s handing out records, almost two years late, stamped across a desk that keeps multiplying. Every time I reach the top of the pile there’s another underneath with my name misspelled on it. A worm is on the desk too, eating one corner of a form, and I understand — in the stupid clear logic dreams give you — that it’s eating the oldest page first, because that’s the order the body judges least essential.

[…] I ask for my own record and the clerk says it’s being processed, it’s always being processed, and somewhere under the desk 346 of the same clerk are saying it at once.

The worm finishes the corner and starts on the staple. I think: stapling it tighter won’t help. I say it out loud. Nobody behind the desk has ears for that either.