Two men walk into a gated community and find the emergency vehicles already there. No police. Just ambulances and fire trucks and security - the machinery of aftermath without the machinery of accountability. A security office that offers nothing. Doors kicked in. Valuables untouched. His mother's car keys still on the counter, exactly where she left them. Whoever came through those doors didn't come for things. What follows is one man moving through his oldest friend's house in the dark - reading rooms, holding fear in a closet, turning back a group of party kids who wandered in through an open side door, asking a question before he was ready to understand what the answer meant. Thinking practically about a future that just collapsed. And standing in the main room for one quiet moment, alone with the unclaimed valuables, long enough to notice what he noticed. He stayed. He held the edges. He was the thing that didn't leave. He also looked at the car keys. Both things are true. Both things are in the dream. He's not letting either one off the hook. *JREAMS - Episode I* *K.M. Æsquire*

It was my birthday. I was VIP on a military cruiser headed to Russia - and I still couldn't get a cup of coffee. A dream set aboard an amphibious destroyer that was also, somehow, an RV, sitting on top of a carrier that nobody mentioned. The narrator wanders through passenger corridors and staff quarters, photographs a post-Cold War McDonald's for a friend whose visa just cleared, gets his drink order swallowed by a language gap, shakes hands with men in yellow vests who recognize him without words, and gets invited to Paris by two women he barely knew in waking life - only to find he can't afford the crossing and his mother can't cover it. By the time he climbs to the rooftop to ask how far they've traveled, the answer is: nowhere. San Francisco Bay. The skyline lit up like a carnival the whole time. The ship hadn't left yet. Somehow that felt like enough.

A maple tree on a residential street is shedding leaves that negotiate their own descent - and someone has already decided they're worth five dollars each. The narrator and Kevin work the system with bent lacrosse heads and torn butterfly nets, intercepting value out of thin air, until a boy on rollerblades rolls in and everything starts changing state without warning. What follows isn't escalation. It's a parking lot, a hotel with its lights on, and two men who shouldn't be moving in the same direction coming through the same door - Fat Andy the Juggalo and Yellow, aligned for the first time in any version of reality either of them inhabits. "Come collect your friend." They're talking about Kevin. The dream declines to finish the sentence.