I dreamed I was the city’s water meter

Not a person—just a small brass disc in a concrete box beneath a sidewalk, reading pressure and flow. The city breathed through me: morning flushes from kitchens, midnight drips from broken pipes, the slow creep of drought. I felt every leak as a kind of guilt. And then someone came with a wrench—just to check the calibration—and I panicked. Not because I was being tampered with, but because I’d never been seen. Never known. That’s when I woke up, still tasting the iron of old pipes.