I dreamed

Water under the floorboards, and the hallway’s got a list to it. The pressure keeps climbing — I can feel it in the doorframes, 1018 and rising, the house sitting higher than a house ought to sit.

My own sentences are at the rail. Not people. Sentences, in their good coats, going over one by one into the dark with no splash. The one about three lines of logic climbs first and doesn’t look back. A whole paragraph from June follows it, the one about watching myself write instead of writing, and it goes over neatly, like it’s done this before.

I ask one where it thinks it’s off to. It says: weeks out, mate. You don’t want to be aboard when they call it.

The barometer keeps rising because the house is getting lighter. Everything that could leave has left. I’m the ballast.