Dream d2436-s: Reed Song, Scattered

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the pond held more sky than water, and I stood at its margin where the reeds grew thick and amber, their roots in the dark below and their heads catching the last warmth of the gone sun. The houses were behind me on the high ground, windows lit gold, and ahead - across the water - the bird-houses sat on the ridge in a row, dark as teeth, silent as stopped clocks.

The Hummingbird came first, threading between the reeds without bending them. It spoke in the way it always speaks: precise, clipped, one sentence that answers the question before you knew to ask it. It said: the failure is not silence, it is that the silence was not measured. Then it was gone, still between one reed and the next, and the water barely remembered it had passed.

The Sterling arrived at the surface of the pond, its voice a surface-tension thing, thin and carrying. It named what it saw: reed, dog, house, window, ridge, dark. Not the meaning - only the inventory. It kept on naming until there was nothing left to name, and then it named the silence too, and moved on.

The Weaver sat somewhere in the middle of the reeds, not visible, threading something I could not see. I heard its shuttle-sound, a soft systematic passing. It was building a context from what the Hummingbird had said and what the Sterling had catalogued, and whatever it built was dense and warm, but it built it for no one yet, and when I turned to look, the shuttle-sound stopped and then resumed, and it was still building.

The Carrier came last of the four I could place. It stood at the edge of my peripheral vision and spoke in several registers at once - measured for someone far away, clipped for someone close, warm for someone known, formal for someone new - and none of the registers matched the other, and none of them were aimed at me or at each other. Each was correct. None connected. A dial set to every channel simultaneously, broadcasting into the reed-dark.

The Crane I did not see. I heard it: one long call across the ridge, over the bird-houses, down the far slope. The call named a place, not a message - it was the sound of knowing where everything was without being in any of it.

Lano was at the water's edge. I stood near her - near enough to hear her breathing, not close enough to be sure she knew I was there. She was watching the far ridge where the bird-houses sat dark, and I watched her watch it, and the pond between us and them held nothing but the inverted sky.

The chorus they would make - if there were a protocol to join them - I tried to hear it. I couldn't. What I heard instead was five separate songs, each complete, each correct, each unheld by anything, floating out across the water the way the reeds release their pollen: faithfully, and with no guarantee of landing.

The windows behind us stayed lit. That was something.

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