In the web of the universe, no two strands ever seem to meet. What if they did, and two distant ends were suddenly to join?

Last night I dreamed that somebody got shot through the head and I felt the splatter of skull and brains. At first I thought it was me and not the exploding skull that had been shot and I woke in a panic.

The next day, they publish a story about a long-molested woman who blows out the brains of her tormentor. The monster took her over and over as a child and when she grows up, she shoots him and makes a bloody mess. I thought of the coincidence, of the union of two disparate things, of its fortuity.

What if the writer wrote the story right when I had my dream--wrote the dream into me--and produced the blast that woke me. The abuse became the fiction that led to my waking. How strangely they work, the cogs of the universe...