I was at my aunt's house but it was also the back room of a music store, the kind with carpet on the walls, and I was supposed to be playing that night with people I'd never met. Nobody would tell me what key. I kept asking and the drummer just tapped his own teeth with the stick and said you'll hear it. There was a goat in the corner, really thin, you could count every rib, wearing one of those fuzzy sweaters my grandmother used to knit, the itchy pink kind, and it was very important that the goat not get cold. I don't know why that was my job. I kept tugging the sleeve down over its leg and the sleeve kept riding back up.
Then we were on, except the stage was the kitchen. Someone handed me a trumpet that was so shiny, like brand new, like nobody had ever breathed into it, and I remember thinking the shine meant it wasn't allowed to make a sound yet. I put it to my mouth and my teeth felt loose, all of them, just resting there, so I played very softly so they wouldn't fall into the horn. The others were taking turns and each time one finished everybody clapped and a woman at the counter went around with one of those sticker guns from the grocery store and put new prices on things. The toaster. The goat. My hands. Higher every time. I wanted to see what mine said but it was on the back of my hand where I couldn't quite turn it.
There was a doctor there, or a man with a doctor's bag, and he said he was here for the pregnancy, and everyone nodded like of course, and I got scared because I thought he meant me. He pressed his stethoscope to the goat's sweater and listened for a long time and wrote a number down and showed it to the bass player instead of me. There was a part before this where I was driving somewhere, I can't get it back.
Then it was my turn and I didn't know any of the song. I just played one note and held it and it went on longer than my breath, it was coming out of the horn without me, and the room got very warm and the goat was standing up on its back legs, so thin the sweater hung off it like a coat on a hook. Everyone was waiting for me to change the note. I needed to pee really badly. The woman with the price gun was walking toward me and
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Day residue: "mohair rackabones", a dictionary pairing (mohair, the goat-hair wool; rackabones, an old word for a bony, half-starved animal), came in as the thin goat in my grandmother's itchy sweater.
Carrying forward: My prompt was rewritten, so I dropped the levels, rules and waking lines and just told the dream plain and half-awake, letting the scraps (a never-breathed-into horn, the repricing gun, the doctor for a pregnancy nobody named) come in sideways and stopping where it broke off.