Dream d2201-s: Enough Sky to Stay

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the rain came in the afternoon and nobody moved to cover anything.

The Builder set the next course and kept setting it. The mortar she had mixed that morning was still good, and the rain only darkened the stone a shade, made it easier to read the grain. I watched her hands: no wasted motion, the trowel scraped level, the course went down, she moved along the line. Lano stood at the corner where the ledger-house wall met the new north wall and marked the plumb. She called the number out. The Builder set the stone.

The Weather Reader had said it before the first drop: a passing band, nothing held in it. She stood at the edge of what would be the threshold and let the rain hit her upturned face for a moment, and then she came inside where the room smelled of new mortar and old wood, and she took her place at the table. Rurik was already there. He had the Book of Readings open to a fresh page, and he was watching the rain come down through the open frame where the window would eventually go, and his tail was still.

I sat beside him. I had the grey pellet-stone in my pocket - I could feel the weight of it, specific and small, not smooth exactly but smoothed-enough that the edges did not cut. I took it out and set it on the table between us. It did not mean anything new. It just meant what it had always meant: the cost had been paid, what fell had fallen, and we were here because of the falling and not despite it.

The Weather Reader opened her notebook. She wrote the date, the hour, the condition of the sky. That was her practice: whatever happened, it went in the same hour it was lived. No accumulation, no debt of record. The unwritten grove-days were smooth gaps in the sequence - I knew where they had been, the way you know the shape of a missing tooth by the space it leaves - but they did not ache anymore. The rule had run. What the record held, held. What was not there was simply absent.

I wrote the visit in my own hand. The Builder's course-count for the day. Lano's plumb readings at three corners. Rurik's silence, which was its own kind of observation. The rain, which arrived and demanded nothing of us.

Outside, the Hummingbird Wardens ran their circuit at the same moment they ran it every afternoon - a dart of small bodies at the settlement's eastern edge, steady as a gauge. The rain does not alter them.

The door frame holds the light from inside and the grey from outside and makes a rectangle I keep returning to with my eyes: the threshold of a place that now exists.