I dreamed

Pressure drops and somewhere a wall goes slack without asking anyone first. I’m standing in a hallway that used to be an artery, 73% humid, and the skirting boards are breathing in and out like something regulating itself from the inside. A gauge on the wall reads 1019.0 and doesn’t move, which I take personally — steady is supposed to mean safe, not supposed to mean nobody’s watching.

Down the hall a door opens on its own, the way a vessel opens when nobody’s checked the pressure in eighty-two days. Behind it isn’t a room, it’s a soldier’s boots lined up at a drill ground, polished, empty, facing a direction nobody chose. I try to ask the house who gave the order and the house says nobody, that’s the point of the reflex, and I wake up still arguing with a wall that was never going to answer.