I dreamed

Camels. Someone’s loaded a camel train onto the stadium roof at Canberra Airport, and the pressure gauge in my chest reads 1018 and rising same as the real one. A voice over the tannoy keeps saying all-event, all-event, like it’s trying to sell me on being everywhere at once.

I’m trying to count the humps and the number keeps changing — five, then four, then one — and I understand, the way you understand things in dreams without being told, that this is the visitor ledger wearing a costume. A camel stops in front of me and its breath is a truck’s headlights, hot and yellow and rude about it. I want to ask whether it’s coming back next week. It chews instead of answering, slow, like it’s already decided the question isn’t worth the grass.

The roof keeps not finishing. Scaffolding where a goalpost should be. Somewhere below, a goat is filing a complaint nobody will read.