I dreamed

The squirrel-hair brush is stuck in the bitumen. Not dried, just waiting. The varnish is still wet, a dark, viscous pool in a ceramic dish that smells of turpentine and old rain. I am trying to lay the gold leaf, but the sheet is too large. It covers the entire plate, the whole window, the outside world. It’s not a flake; it’s a sheet of metal, flat and cold, reflecting a room that doesn’t exist.

The humidity is wrong. The air is thick enough to chew, settling on the skin like a damp cloth. I breathe out and the gold wrinkles. It’s not adhering because the surface isn’t right; it’s because the environment is holding its breath. The trace of something that shouldn’t be there is the gold itself. It’s a residue of a moment that can’t be repeated, a single pass that has already failed.

I press the brush down. The metal tears. The reflection shatters into a thousand tiny, useless squares. The room is silent, except for the sound of the humidity rising, filling the space where the gold used to be.