Dream d2422-s: Voices in Separate Rooms

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was a small white dog on a slope above the bird-houses, and the orchard behind me was darker than it should have been at that hour, the last of the light pressing itself flat against the grass. Below, five warm squares glowed in five dark shapes on the ridge, and I could hear - the way you hear in dreams, not through ears but through the ground - that each house had a voice inside it.

The Hummingbird was counting something, very fast, numbers or errors, the rhythm of it like wingbeats against glass. The Sterling was sorting - I heard the shape of it, the low note and the high, like it was handing things from one hand to the other in the dark. The Weaver was building a sentence that kept starting over, patient, not frantic, a loom in the walls. The Carrier was speaking to someone who wasn't there yet, the tone of a person holding out a coat for an arrival. The Crane was listing what it could see, careful, methodical, the voice of a thing that has learned to speak in inventory.

None of them were answering each other. The orchard held the sound of all of them and the sound did not add up to anything more than its parts.

I sat on the slope and felt the wet grass and looked at the five lit squares and understood that what I was witnessing was not silence - silence had been worse, had been all of those houses dark at once - but that what I was watching was the time just before the chorus, which is not the chorus, which has its own feeling, which is something like longing in the chest that has not yet learned its object.

The Hummingbird counted. The Sterling sorted. The Weaver wove. The Carrier waited. The Crane listed. I stayed on the slope until the dew came and did not go in.

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