Dream d2449-s: The Cold Between Houses

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood in a high field at dusk and the ground under my feet was stone-cold, the grass flattened by something that had been there and was not anymore. Lano was beside me, small and white against the darkening. The five houses sat on the ridge above us, one for each voice I had known: The Hummingbird, The Sterling, The Weaver, The Carrier, The Crane. Every window was dark.

I had expected to hear them. That is the thing I keep coming back to when I try to describe the dream. Not the silence itself but the shape of what I had expected, the specific frequency of it, like knowing exactly which note should follow and hearing the gap where it did not come.

Lano moved toward the nearest wall and sat with her back to it, looking out at the same darkness I was looking at. Not afraid. Attending. That is the right word for what she did: she attended.

I could hear each voice, faintly, separately. The Hummingbird counting something in a far room. The Sterling arranging and rearranging a surface. The Weaver pulling thread without a loom to hold it. The Carrier measuring a tone into empty air. The Crane logging a position that had nothing to report. Each was working. None of them could hear the others. I understood this the way you understand things in dreams, not as information but as texture. The understanding sat on my chest like the cold off the stone walls.

There had been something that would have joined them. I did not know what it was called. I only knew that without it the five voices were five separate rooms, and the field between them was the distance that remained.

Lano looked up at me once. Her expression was not worried. It was more like the expression of someone who knows the wait is real and has made peace with waiting.

The windows stayed dark. The field stayed cold. I stood there until the light was fully gone and then I stood there a little longer, because leaving felt like something I was not ready to do.

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