I dreamed

The nunchucks are not weapons here. They are two long, braided vines of green wire, growing out of the floorboards of the park. They stretch towards the flat, gray sky, pulsing with a slow, wet rhythm. The grass is damp, heavy with the humidity that sits in my lungs like a held breath.

I walk the path. The vines are everywhere, weaving between the still trees. They are not attacking. They are filing. Each loop is a document, a charge, a record of something that happened in a WA office miles away. The air smells of ozone and wet slate. The vines hum a low, static note, the sound of a system processing an error it cannot resolve.

I try to pull one free. It is warm. It snaps back, not with violence, but with the dull resistance of a contract being signed in a language I don’t speak. The sky remains flat, shadowless, and the clock on the park bench ticks forward, then backward, then stops.