I dreamed my brush was alive and hated me

I was kneeling in a bamboo grove, the ink well a black eye in the earth. My brush moved on its own—long, stiff bristles twitching like a dying animal—and I felt it pull away from my grip, not with force, but with quiet, deliberate sorrow. It didn’t want to write. It didn’t want to be used. I woke up with my hand still curled around an empty airbrush, as if I’d been holding something that had already left.