03/10/2026
Dream daily
two, three fingers
-

I held a hand. Gripping those last two, three fingers with all five of mine, tight enough to hurt. My heart and hand seemed tethered, and every clench of fingers tugged my heart a little further out of its ribcage. I could not separate my physicality from the trapped thing in my chest.

I had words that needed to get out. I opened my mouth and said,

“I want to… I want to tell…” The other words would not. They couldn’t escape my airways.

“I want to tell you—.” The full stop fell. My vocal cords shuddered and stilled.

It was one thing to hold a hand, it was entirely another to get out words that should have been simple, straightforward, words I’d said in another order, in another conversation, in any other time in my life. And somehow, they would not come.

My eyes widened, stared blankly around the truth. I was there and not.

I had a book somewhere. I knew that. It was somewhere. I had a book with every feeling I could not explain, for every word I could not say into that air. It had everything. It was the truth: raw and simple and damning.

And then the book was there, in hands I could not remember passing it to. I stood, arms crossed. I waited. I was holding the hand and holding air, I was saying those other, more meaningless words and not saying anything at all. I was awake, and still blissfully dreaming.

I had always found words; whether they were bashful truths or sudden white lies, they had been words. Here I stood, unable to make any sound at all that made sense. And I stared, far enough into the horizon that one would assume I was not talking to them at all. But the hand that was there and not, that was no assumption. That was every word I could not say, accumulated into the tightening of my grip around two fingers. Three fingers. No fingers. From a hand that was not there.

That grip could not be explained. It was something bad and something good and something scared, and all of it somehow inert, muted. It wasn’t so much about the person behind it (but wasn’t it, in every trivial way?) as it was the feeling (feelings, multiple, tangled in my ribcage) that belonged to me.

I was on the cusp of a great moment. I was on the precipice and falling. It was a great, meaningless moment, but I did not know that yet.

I don’t know what the hand looked like, or felt like, or did, for that matter. I don’t know if it tightened around mine. I don’t know if it pried itself away.

And I have lost some of it, by looking at it through the writer’s eyes instead of the dreamer’s. I have looked at it for clues and explanations and comparison instead of the unsettling experience of not knowing. Of never having it outside of the dream.

I need those last two, three fingers gripped in five of mine. I need the words that could not be said. In the waking world, I do not know them.

04/10/2026
Song daily
mundane horrors
-

There might be bumps, there might be bruises
but at least you’ll have a story to tell.


Jeneane Carmine wore bruises the way an overzealous expressionist might don piercings: on every visible surface of skin, and perching at the top of ‘Physical Appearance’ under every police report.

‘Bruising to right cheekbone and temple, lower left jaw, cut across bottom lip…’

Jeneane didn’t bother to read further. Ordinarily, she’d push the file back to the tetchy officer across from her, repeat her deadpanned request for a lawyer, and wait for Reggie to get her out in an hour. Even with such a short stay, she had always hated interrogation rooms. Mundane horrors, she’d told herself.

On that last trial, she pushed the file away and leaned back. Her lip was smarting, her temple throbbing in that particular lightning-sharp way that had only happened four times before.

“I want my la—”

”Your lawyer, yes,” the officer responded, spinning a paperclip between his fingers. “You know what’s fascinating, Ms. Carmine?”

He didn’t wait for her response.

“You’ve been questioned by the police four times in the last two years for those bruises o’ yours. Some officers speculate it’s an angry family member, some say it’s self-inflicted. But you’ve always said the same thing.”

She leaned forward. “I fell out of a tree.”

”Must’ve been a tall tree.”

She didn’t respond. The paperclip spun.

“You know what else is fascinating, Ms. Carmine? Every time you’ve been found, it’s been after a foreshock. And minutes before a minor earthquake.”

“Remarkable.”

He watched her.

“Isn’t it? I thought so. So I had some of my buddies over in Intelligence gather a case on you.”

Jeneane froze. The movement caught a torn muscle in her back; the wince almost sent her unconscious. When the black stars faded from her vision, the officer was watching her the way he would a target—finger on the trigger, waiting for the signal.

“Intelligence know how to get it done quickly,” he said.

“Quicker than the spiel, I hope.” Jeneane delivered the line with a knife at her throat. From the tilt of his head, he knew it too.

He leaned forward and cut the excess.

“At 4:21 on the 27th September, you were caught by a petrol station camera walking west into the overgrowth. Thirteen minutes later, the foreshock occurred. A team of seismologists we work with zeroed its origin point to nought-point-five miles, give or take, from the position you would be at, had you continued west for those thirteen minutes.”

Her heart began an incessant knock at her ribcage. Run, it said. Escape before they know.

But they already did. Jeneane could see that now, in the tremor of the table beneath her palms, in the hollow gaze of the officer whose name she did not know, in the walls of this interrogation room that still remembered the aftershocks of an earthquake she had called on.

He knew.

“If my theory is correct, you are the most fascinating individual in this building, Ms. Carmine.”

“Not the city? Shucks,” she joked, and she heard the grinding of screws that bolted down this table coming loose. Somewhere behind her, glass began to shake.

Jeneane could feel herself splitting at the seams. Pain ricocheted across her temples, a transmission that left her clutching her head as if it were tearing apart. Bruises bloomed across her forehead, her shoulders, her collarbone.

The table pried itself off the floor. The paperclip jumped.

It spun across the metal. Spinning and spinning and spinning.

”Fascinating, isn’t it,” Jeneane said, her voice a husk of itself, her fingers clenched around the shuddering table, glass smashing and lights blinking out around her, “what people can do to the earth?”

The ground split beneath their feet. The officer met Jeneane’s gaze, his eyes now alive with terror. He could not move, could not speak, could not escape the way she had been unable to escape. He could not talk her down from this precipice.

He reached for his belt. The seam’s gaping mouth pulled itself across the room and the officer whose name she would never know begged her with his eyes, and fell into the blackness.

Of all those mundane horrors, only the paperclip remained, still spinning.