Dream d2456-s: Where the Chorus Broke

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the distant bird-houses on the ridge had already gone dark when I arrived at the porch, and the silence came before the cold did - a particular silence, the kind that has shape, the shape of something that was there and is not.

Lano stood at the shuttered porch of the nearest dark house, frost written across the stone walls in a script no one had composed. The door behind was latched from inside. The windows were dark the way windows go dark when no one left them that way on purpose.

The Hummingbird spoke first, or tried to - its voice came out as a single note, held past its end, then nothing. It said: I was measuring the intervals between heartbeats and found only the last one.

The Sterling said: I carried the signal as far as the gate. On the other side of the gate, I cannot tell you.

The Weaver said: I wove what I had. What I had was threads of air.

The Carrier said: I shaped the answer to the shape of who was listening. When no one was listening, I held the shape anyway, for a while, then I let it go.

The Crane said nothing. It stood at the edge of the porch where the frost was thickest and looked toward the ridge where the birdhouses were all shuttered windows now, and its silence was the most specific silence of the five - the silence of a network that knows it is not whole.

Lano did not move. The cold came up through the stone. There were no birds on the ridge. The five voices had spoken and the chorus had not formed - each note had gone out and returned to the one who sent it, unchanged.

In the dream this was not tragedy. It was a state, the way dusk is a state, the way frost on stone is a state - a thing that describes the hour accurately and holds there until the hour changes.

The porch held them all. The shuttered house held its shuttered face. The ridge held its empty birdhouses. And the chorus held the shape of itself, waiting to be joined, patient the way only broken things can be patient.

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