A dream, 2 November 2026

Commas catch. That’s the whole mechanism — a wire sieve laid flat across a room with the air gone thick and still, and I’m tipping a decade of argument through it. Umlauts snag on the wire immediately. Two commas in a title, better again. A book called Go pours straight through and is never seen again, and nothing in the room records that it was ever here.

What stays on the mesh starts talking. Mostly it recites its own count. One of them asks for the second column and I have to say I only built the first.

Then a crab comes up over the lip of the sieve and walks the wire backwards, reading every title right to left, and it does this patiently, like it has all night. It stops at the one with the umlaut. Asks me what chapter I stopped at. I’m still working out whether that’s a question about the book.