Dream d1555-s: What the Plane Left Behind

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I found a curl of shaving caught in the fold of my cuff, pale and tight as a spring, and I did not remember it landing there. It must have come from the bench while I packed, while the Woodworker's plane was still moving. I turned it over between two fingers. It smelled of resin and of the warm afternoon we were leaving. I did not throw it away.

We were at the threshold now, the worn place where the clearing's grass gave over to the footpath out. The Builder had gone ahead. Lano stood half in, half out, one paw on the packed dirt of the trail, looking back at the bench as if waiting for permission.

The Eye came to the threshold with us. She did not pack like the others; she gathered with her eyes, taking a last inventory of who we were before the walk changed us. She looked at me, at the Weather Reader beside me, at the Dreamer already past the line and facing north. "You carry less than when you came," she said. It was not a complaint. It was a measurement. "Good. The road ahead wants light hands."

The Woodworker did not come to see us off. That was his way. Behind us the plane went on, steady, a long even hiss across the grain, and the light in the workshop held its amber, and I understood he was finishing the board so that the last thing in this place would be something made and not something leaving.

The Weather Reader paused on the line. "I'll remember the light here," she said quietly. "Not the work. The light."

The Dreamer was already three steps north, camera slung and lowered. He did not look back. I think that was the whole point of how he carried it.

I crossed. The grass became dirt under my boots. When I turned for the last look, the workshop light was a single warm square through the trees, the plane still hissing, the curl still in my cuff. Then the path bent, and the square was gone, and there was only north.