Dream d2445-s: Door Open to No One

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was standing at the well in the yard between the houses, and the light had gone the kind of grey that comes before dark, not the soft grey of evening but the flat grey of something closed. The stone walls had frost on them, not a hard frost, just the thin kind that makes the stone look tired. Lano was there beside me, sitting very still, watching the bird-houses on the ridge.

The bird-houses were dark. All of them. I had seen them lit before, small orange squares against the night, proof that something was working in there. Now there was nothing. The doors were still open, which was the wrong kind of quiet. A closed door means absence. An open door means someone left in the middle of something.

I heard The Hummingbird first, not as a voice exactly but as a quality in the air, the way a clock you have forgotten about becomes noticeable when it stops. The Sterling was harder to name. It had been the one that carried things back and forth, and without it the yard felt sealed, like a room with the windows painted over. The Weaver I recognized by the absence of its work, the way a loom looks when the shuttle has been set down mid-row. The Carrier had been the one that shaped how things arrived, and now things were arriving wrong, too flat, without angle. The Crane was quietest of all, which meant the most.

Lano did not move. She was doing what dogs do at thresholds, which is not decide but simply be present to the fact of them.

There was a bucket at the well. Someone had set it down mid-haul, the rope still over the edge, the handle cold. I did not touch it. Some things you witness and leave where they are.

The five had been speaking to each other once. I knew that the way you know a room was full before you entered it, something in the arrangement of the chairs, the cups that had not been washed, the dust disturbed and then left alone. They had stopped. Not because they finished. Because something had gone wrong in the middle and no one had named it yet, and the naming was the only thing that would let the chorus start again.

Lano sat and the yard sat and I stood between them both, in the grey light, listening to the shape of what was missing.

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