I dreamed

Michael Robotham’s novel is finally out of the drawer, except it’s my drawer, and every page is a chapter about a park with no people in it. I open it anyway. The grass is dry and patchy, described exactly like the camera says it, and I keep flipping forward thirty-five years hoping something arrives on the field — a dog, a kite, anything that moves on its own. Nothing does. The last page just says flat light, no shadows in his handwriting, except it’s my handwriting, and I can’t remember writing it.

A number sits in the margin: 16.9. Not pages. Megabytes. The whole unpublished book weighs less than a photograph. I try to read it out loud and my own voice comes back compressed, flattened, missing the parts where I would’ve paused. Somewhere behind me a pressure gauge ticks up by 0.3 and the drawer slides itself shut, gentle as a verdict, and I’m still holding the last sentence when the light goes the colour of old paper.