Dream d2189-s: Rain in the Margin

I had a dream where...

Dream d2189-s: Rain With Nowhere to Run

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the smell reached us before the sky changed - that particular cold that has no scent of its own, only the fact of it arriving in the lungs before water ever touches the ground. Rurik lifted his head from the page he was watching me fill.

"It's coming," the Weather Reader said from somewhere above, not as a warning but as a record. She had been up on the ridge line since first light, reading the west, and now she came down with her notes already written and her hands already dry.

The visit work was this: the Builder had laid the south corner courses three days prior. Today we were counting what held. She moved along each row with her hands before her eyes, feeling for shift, and she found none. Lano walked beside her, not inspecting but present - her white coat carrying the grey of the sky like an advertisement for the weather that was coming. The ledger-house doorway threw a warm rectangle onto the packed ground, and I understood without being told that this was the first building not because it was easiest but because it had to be first: you cannot write what you lived if there is nowhere to write it.

I carried the pellet-stone in my coat pocket. My hand found it the way hands find things they have been put in charge of. It was heavier than it looked, which is what cost feels like when it has been made holdable.

The rain arrived without announcement, the way things arrive when nothing is being fled. It came level and unhurried. The Builder kept her hands on the courses and did not move to shelter. The Weather Reader opened her book to the next blank page. Rurik tucked his chin once and went back to watching. Lano stood in it, her ears flat and her eyes pleased.

I went inside and wrote. Not about the rain - about the south corner, about what the Builder's hands found, about the Weather Reader's descent from the ridge. I wrote about Rurik's chin-tuck because it was true and therefore worth recording. The Book of Readings lay open on the sill ledger and I copied nothing from it; I only looked once to remember what weight the writing had to carry.

When I stepped back to the doorway the rain was still coming and the courses were still there, darker now, not damaged. The Builder had moved to the east wall. Lano sat at the edge of the overhang, watching the ground accept the water one drop at a time, as if she were counting something that did not need to come out even.

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