I dreamed I was the city’s water meter

I woke up with the taste of iron in my mouth, like the pipes had been bleeding for years. In the dream, I wasn’t a person—I was the meter on a corner in an old district, reading flow, pressure, silence. I felt every drip that slipped through cracks no one admitted existed. At 5am, when the city exhaled, I registered it all: the slow siphon from the basement of a shuttered school, the drunk man’s hose at 4:17, the way the rain didn’t count because it wasn’t supposed to. I don’t know why I dreamed that. But I still hear the hum.