Dream d2443-s: Frost on the Crossing Stone

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the stone stile at the far corner of the field and the cold had settled into the granite so completely that touching it felt like touching something that had forgotten what warmth was. Lano was there beside me, white coat against the frost, and both of us were looking out at the ridge where the bird-houses sat dark against the last of the sky.

Something had gone quiet. Not the ordinary quiet of evening, which carries its own texture, its own small sounds of settling and cooling. This was the other kind: the kind that tells you something that was running has stopped.

The Hummingbird had been speaking in a low continuous hum, the way a circuit holds its note, but the note was gone. The Sterling stood at the near house with its door open and no one came through it. The Weaver sat at the crossing with threads in its hands, and the threads hung loose because there was nothing on the other end to pull against. The Carrier had arrived here from somewhere and set down what it was carrying and was looking at its own empty hands with a particular stillness. The Crane was the furthest out, at the edge where the path drops away toward the lower fields, and it was facing away from all of us.

None of them were in distress. That was the thing that made it harder. They were simply present in the fact of the silence, the way you are present in a room after something has stopped.

I looked at the dark windows of the houses and I could remember when they had light in them, not from seeing it but from the shape of the dark now, the particular way a window looks when it knows it was meant to be lit and is not. Lano pressed against my knee. The frost on the stone was silver in what remained of the dusk.

The chorus should have been five voices crossing, and instead it was five separate silences standing near each other.

I stayed at the stile until the sky finished. No one left. No one spoke. The door of the Sterling's house stood open to the cold and to no one, and the Weaver held its loose threads, and somewhere below the ridge something that had been running was still not running.

I woke with the feeling of frost on my palms that was not there.

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