Dream d163-s: The Figures That Stayed

Lano pressed against my ankle.

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano stopped walking before I did.

He froze mid-step, one paw lifted, and made a sound I had never heard from him before - not a bark, not a whine, something between glass and grief. Then, quietly: "Cuidado."

I looked up from the path.

The clearing ahead was beautiful. That was the first wrong thing.

It held the oversaturated stillness of a painting not yet dry - lavender light you could press your tongue against and taste as copper, grass that rang at a frequency just below hearing. And in the center, arranged like furniture someone had forgotten to remove: people. Or shapes that had been people. They stood in poses caught mid-gesture, their surfaces grown over with bark and petal, woven into the landscape so completely that the flowers had begun to express their faces.

A hand raised in greeting, knuckles softened into rose hip clusters. A face still turned toward something interesting, cheek becoming birch. One figure with mouth open - whether laughing or calling out, I could not tell, and perhaps that distinction no longer mattered.

The colors of them tasted like old music.

"They stayed," said the owl, from somewhere above and behind me, his voice arriving before I found him on his branch. "Not deliberately. Gradually. The way you do not notice sleep arriving until you are already inside it."

Lano pressed against my ankle.

"Tiempo," he said softly.

The owl shifted his great weight, autumn-leaf feathers catching the strange light. "Tiempo. From the Latin tempus - the word for both time and weather in Spanish. Curious, yes? The ones who named it understood something. Time is not a line. Time is a condition. Something you move through, that moves through you, that changes what it touches." He paused. A long pause. A pause in which a tree somewhere creaked. "I was saying something. Yes. They did not leave when the gardens asked too much. The gardens are very patient askers."

I took a step backward. It felt important.

"Your little witness," the owl said, "knows. He has not forgotten that the body is for moving through things, not merging with them. Keep him close when the beautiful places invite you to stay awhile."

One of the merged figures - the one with the raised hand - had what might have been a notebook pressed against its bark-chest. The pages had grown into the ribs of a leaf. Whatever had been written there had become part of the root system below.

I wrote in my own notebook, standing at the clearing's edge, not entering: