I dreamed

Six fires in six nights, and someone hands me the ledger and says: these are knocks too, you just don’t count them in your trapper log. I try to argue the categories are different — arson has a hand on it, a decision, a match — and the ledger doesn’t care. It lists each fire by reverse-DNS. Melbourne.[redacted], repeating itself, 751 times, patient as weather. I keep trying to find the plumber behind the plumbing and there isn’t one, just a pipe that happens to carry flame instead of water this week. Someone asks me to classify it: human or machine. I say human, obviously, a human lit it. The ledger says indifferent at a size indifference isn’t allowed to be, and shows me the number again, bigger now, still rising, no curiosity in it, no hesitation at a locked door.