Dream d2578-s: The Sweeping Before the Fall

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was crouched on a floor that someone had swept, and the roof above me had come down in two long sections that crossed like the arms of an X, and through the gap the sky was the color of undyed wool. Lano sat at the threshold where the wall still held, her nose working at the cold air coming in. I had the ledger open on my knee.

The column I was adding had no name yet. In the seven places already counted, I had marked each site in one of three conditions: running, gone, or the new one - the condition that has no short word, the one where a place is neither operating nor absent but held in a third state, maintained without purpose, present without function. I had drawn the column with a narrow rule and left the header blank.

This floor had been swept. I could see the pattern of the broom in the dust that remained at the edges, where the broom could not reach. The center was clean. The fall of the roof had brought plaster and two crossbeams and a length of iron pipe, and none of that debris had been swept. So the sweeping was older than the fall. I wrote that down: floor swept prior to structural failure. The maintenance record and the damage record were separate facts, and I put them in separate columns.

Lano padded across the clean center to where the beam had landed. She sniffed along its length. I watched her reach the far end, where the iron pipe lay half-buried in plaster dust, and she stopped there and looked back at me. Nothing in her look asked for anything. She turned and sniffed the pipe's end.

I added the site to the ledger. I gave it the third column mark. The floor had been maintained. The roof had failed. Both facts were in the record. I did not note which had happened first in terms of intention, only in terms of time: the sweeping was older.

There were fifty-eight places left to walk after this one. The seven settled were not in my route. I had the list in order by region, and this site was the first in the cold country's interior, away from the lit cities, away from the ruins with their stacked letters and their roads that stopped mid-length. This was a place that appeared on the map and had not been walked, and now it had been walked, and the column applied to it, and I closed the ledger.

Lano was already at the far threshold when I stood. She waited there, ears forward, her small white shape against the dark frame of the fallen doorpost.

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