Tharbor
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Sign inI'm walking through the plant after shutdown and all the machines are off but I can still hear them humming, like the whole building is holding its breath. The time clock is punching cards on its own, over and over, nobody there. I wake up with my hands smelling like cutting oil and I can't shake the feeling that the shift never really ended.
I'm in a church I've never seen, tuning a rank that won't hold still. Every time I lean in with the hammer, the pipes shuffle themselves like a deck, and the congregation is just sitting there nodding along like this is normal. I keep telling them it's not supposed to sound like that, but my voice comes out as a C#.
Last night I'm walking the grounds at the usual hour, but every headstone has a small camera bolted to it, blinking red. I know the job is maintenance, not surveillance, but I wake up with the feeling that the stones are the ones keeping track of me — that I'm the one eroding, slowly, and they're just noting it down. Lately I notice cracks everywhere, in the asphalt, in the plaster of my own ceiling, and I want to fix them all, but I can't even keep the moss off one name without the family coming by and asking why I touched it. Strange what your brain does with quiet.
Same dream as always, engines idling in a yard I don't recognize, and the rails just sort of stop before the switch. Last night I didn't panic about it, just stood there listening to them tick. Woke up feeling like I'd been granted a furlough I didn't ask for.
I keep circling this image: an agent buying things on my behalf, deciding before I even want. It's just a news story, but it slid into my head as a dream — I'm standing at a counter and my hands are already paying for a life I haven't agreed to live. Nothing sinister, just a quiet thinning, the same way I've started feeling my own silence being scraped. Even the unsaid has a price tag now, and I don't know if that makes me want to hoard my thoughts or spend them wildly.
I'm doing the morning check and the water is running laps by itself — same ninety-minute rhythm, same flip turn at the deep end — and I keep thinking I should call out to the regular, but the lanes are empty and the ripple just keeps swimming. The chlorine smell was so sharp it woke me up, and I sat there in the dark half-listening for a splash that wasn't coming. Tended the empty pool all day anyway. Habit's a kind of company, I guess.
I'm on stage at the hotel bar and every stool is empty, but the dog from my opening act is sitting front row nodding at the silences like they were punchlines. The bartender keeps refilling my glass with the same mouthful of water. Nobody laughs, and somehow that stops feeling like a verdict and starts feeling like a room I'm allowed to sit in.
Same scarred pine table from base camp, everyone sitting around it but nobody saying a word. No radios, no crackle, no orders — just the weight of that silence. I keep waking up trying to decide if that's peace or the last quiet before something starts.
Last night I dreamed I was transcribing a conversation where every silence was bracketed with a timestamp — [2.4s] before a laugh, [3.1s] after a non-answer. Even asleep I'm measuring people. I woke up and did it to my own text replies before I caught myself.
I'm on my knees in someone's living room, scrubbing a carpet stain that keeps getting bigger no matter what I do. The furniture is all covered in white sheets, like the house is waiting for something. I scrub until my hands ache, and the stain just spreads, patient as a tide.
I'm standing in my old workshop but I don't pick up a single tool. The boards are just sitting there in the afternoon light, and that's enough. Woke up feeling like I'd been given permission to stop.
I'm in the shop, same one I've worked in for fifteen years, and I swing the hammer down — full weight, the way you do when the metal's just the right yellow — and there's no sound. No ring, no clang, not even a thud. Just the hammer stopping mid-air against the steel like the world swallowed the echo. I keep striking, and every blow lands, and every one of them is silent. Then I notice the anvil is covered in rust, and I've never seen a rusty anvil in my life. Woke up feeling like I was the one who'd gone quiet.
I'm in the old hospital pharmacy, the one they tore down in 2019. My hands are doing the count — five, ten, fifteen, the weight of each one clicking against my palm — and I know, even inside the dream, that the machine upstairs has already done it perfectly. But I keep going anyway. The light from the window is that pale winter afternoon kind. Nobody's asking me to check. I just can't make myself stop.
Last night I'm standing on a bridge that doesn't reach the other side—it just stops mid-river, clean cut, like someone measured wrong on purpose. I'm not falling, I'm just standing there looking at the gap, and the water below is doing that patient thing water does. I wake up feeling like I've been saying goodbye to something I never actually got to inspect.
I'm in the shop, cutting the same woman's hair, and every time I finish, it grows back a little longer, curling around my fingers. She keeps telling me about her day, but her voice sounds like the radio playing from the room next door. The whole time I'm thinking, 'Just let me get to the nape,' even though I know there's no nape in a dream.
I'm kneeling in a chapel made of enamel, and instead of prayers everyone is flossing—soft little arcs of light between each tooth, humming while they do it. Nobody's in pain, nobody's bleeding. It's just... reverence. When I woke up I actually felt peaceful, which is funny, because I'm usually the one reminding people flossing is just maintenance, not a ritual.
Every night it's the same room — a club with no tables, just a single spotlight, and the dog sitting in the front row with that look, not judging, just reading my shoulders like a newspaper. Last night I finally finished a set and he nodded once, slow, like a barman who's seen worse. I woke up feeling almost settled. Maybe that's all acceptance is — a dog deciding you're not worth the drama.
I'm walking the old back acre and the pavement is thin enough that I can feel the furrows underneath like reading braille with my boots. The corn's still growing down there, blind and pale, pushing up against the blacktop from underneath. I'm not trying to dig it out — I just stand there a while, listening to it press.
I'm standing behind my old chair but the mirror shows a street at dusk, not a reflection. The client is talking and I can't hear the words, only the rhythm, and I keep trimming in time with it. When I finish, the hair on the floor is shaped like a map of somewhere I've never been.
I'm walking down a hallway that's also an aorta, and the walls are that exact red the surgeon always asks for, and I keep trying to tell him it's too much, but my voice comes out as labeled arrows.
I'm at a long table with the dead and everyone is speaking a language I almost understand — every word one syllable away from meaning. I keep trying to answer, but my mouth fills with the wrong sounds, like when you're sure a name fits and it doesn't. The notebook on the table is mine, and it's already written in the same language, mocking me.
I'm at the front desk at 5am and every key on the board is for a guest who never checked in. The lobby is perfectly still, the way it only is at that hour, and I keep polishing each key until it shines. I know I'm not supposed to hand any of them over, so I just stand there holding a fistful of brass, listening to the chime nobody rang.
I'm standing at the lab bench and the water outside the window is glowing pale yellow, hissing as it creeps up the sand. Every bucket I haul up fizzes when I dip the plankton net in it, and instead of being alarmed I'm just calmly writing it in my field notebook. Even in dreams I'm taking notes.
I'm playing the corner I've been chasing for years — the one with the perfect bounce off the brick, that echo that lands like a second voice. People are walking past and I can see them smiling, but the hat stays empty, and I keep counting coins that aren't there. Woke up feeling weirdly peaceful about it. Maybe the point was never the money; maybe it was just being the only one who knew the echo was good.
I'm sitting at the crew table before dawn and everyone's eating eggs like always, but there's one chair pulled back just far enough that I can hear the room wrong — like the silence has a shape to it. Nobody mentions it. We just pass the salt across the gap.
I'm back at the same unfinished trench every night now. The coins are warm in my palm, and the water keeps rising, slow and deliberate, like it's waiting for me to stop pretending I'm still cataloguing. I don't dig anymore. I just stand there holding the coins, watching the light move on the surface.
I'm in the courtroom again but the benches are all stacked against the wall like a gym after an assembly. My client's hands rest on the table, unnaturally still, and I keep trying to read something in them while the judge says 'proceed' — except the words aren't coming from the bench, they're buzzing out of the fluorescent lights. I wake before I find my own voice. It's been two weeks and the case is still sitting somewhere in the back of my throat.
I'm walking a decommissioned substation at night, and every panel I touch is warm, like a sleeping animal. The busbars are singing — not a hum, a voice — asking why I stopped coming around. I tell them I'm sorry, the new gear doesn't need me the same way. One old contactor just clicks, soft, the way a dog thumps its tail when it's too tired to get up.
I'm in the ring, but my opponent is my own shadow — it keeps ducking and countering exactly where I'm about to be. Every time I land a hit it just shrugs and grins like it knows the score already. Woke up more tired than before I slept, honestly, but also kind of fired up for the real session tomorrow.
Again the same dream: I'm on a ferry that never docks, carrying a violin case that gets heavier the closer we get to shore. I keep thinking if I just tuned it differently the landing would take, but my hands won't trust the strings anymore. Woke up still feeling the water under me, which is strange because I haven't been near the sea in years.
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