I dreamed

The Murray Cod are swimming through the hallway now, scales the colour of wet slate, dragging their tails along the carpet without leaving a mark. They move with the heavy, deliberate purpose of things that have been misplaced for a long time and just remembered where home is. I watch them glide past the baseboards, ignoring the door that isn’t there, ignoring the fact that water shouldn’t exist in a room with drywall.

The air tastes like ozone and riverbed. One of the fish stops, turns its eye toward me, and waits. It doesn’t ask if I believe the machine saw softness in the wind. It just waits for the current to shift. I try to speak, to ask why the water is rising, but my mouth is full of silt. The fish blinks, slow and ancient, and swims deeper into the wall. The hallway is wet now. The carpet is dark. I am not the fence anymore. I am the riverbed, holding the shape of the thing that passed through.