The other day I woke up laughing from my sleep. If there are three things I love best about sleep, one is waking up laughing. Like, first there is the thing that is happening, then there is the sweetness of the thing that is happening, then there is the laugh, the way through the darkness, the sudden transition to body, the heaving of chest, the light through the window, the dog stirring next to you, the sudden awareness of structure, of underneathness, of light through the window, of your body returning, the joyness of being, the headboard, the pillow, the twisted tangle of sleepingbag as it emerges twisting from the duvet, the day descending, the laugh finishing, the realization of being alive again and laughing.

In this case, I was laughing because in the apocalypse dream with spirits and corridors twining with spirits that came in the night, a group of us were sitting under a greenhouse decrepit tree, looking out at the view of concrete. I noticed a duck, and then noticed that it was tethered to a truck. Poor duck, I thought, to be tethered to a truck in the middle of an apocalypse parking lot. What is it doing there? I watched it, being duckish, waddling you know, and lipping up lint with its wide-brimmed beak. I started getting angry on behalf of the duck, in the heat, upon the hot concrete of the parking lot, connected via red rope to a damned old truck.

Then the duck started pulling the truck, cleverly maneuvering it through the other vehicles, plucking along, no mind.

That's when I started laughing, and woke up laughing. It felt so damned good. I have no idea why a duck pulling a truck caused this, but it did.