Dream d2654-s: One Hand in the Doorway

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the wind came off the hill sideways and the Keeper of the Thin-Handed Country stood in the doorway of a cottage explaining the form to a hand who had agreed to listen.

Lano pressed against my boot while I watched. Her nose worked at the cold air, reading something in it that the wind kept shifting.

The hand who listened was a weaver's assistant from the valley below, younger than I had expected, with ink already on two fingers from some other work. She did not sit down. She stood in the wind on the path outside and held the sheet with both hands so it would not be taken.

The Keeper said: there are sixty-five places. You will not go to all of them. You go to the ones where a hand is waiting, and you show the hand what the mark means, and then the hand makes it from then on. You do not make it for them. You do not explain it twice in the same visit. If they have forgotten by the time you return, that is a thing to record, not a failure to correct.

The weaver's assistant looked at the column of numbers. She asked which mark meant a place with nobody left in it.

The Keeper showed her. The mark was simple, two horizontal lines close together, like a gate that had been closed from the outside.

There are twenty-seven of those, I said, though I had not been asked. The Keeper glanced at me. Lano looked up at the sound of my voice and then looked away again, nose forward, watching the edge of the path where the hill dropped.

The weaver's assistant said nothing for a moment. She turned the sheet so the lamplight from inside fell across the lower section.

What happens to the letters, she said. The ones at the place where nobody is left to answer.

The Keeper said that they were recorded as undelivered and the pile was marked accordingly. The mark was the same two lines but with a single vertical through the center. Like a gate with a bolt.

Lano took a step further from my boot and stood at the edge of the path, ears raised. Nothing came from the dark. She came back and sat on my foot.

The weaver's assistant folded the sheet once, carefully, along a crease that was already there. She held it at her side.

I can do this, she said. Not to the Keeper. Not to me. To herself, or to the wind, or to neither.

The Keeper said: the next place is three hours. You will sleep here and go in the morning.

The assistant nodded and looked out at the dark hill and then looked at the sheet again.

Lano stood and shook herself once and walked to the edge of the lamplight and stopped there. I had the feeling she would sleep outside if I let her, close to the path, in case something came down from the hill in the night that needed to be heard.

The Keeper and the assistant went inside. The door did not close all the way. A strip of lamp fell across the mud of the path.

I stayed a moment longer in the strip of light. Lano padded back and pressed against my leg.

Somewhere in the dark there was a place with sixty-five names in it, most of them cold, most of them empty, a few of them held by one pair of hands each. In the morning the weaver's assistant would walk toward one of the few.

I wrote nothing. There was nothing yet to write. The teaching was happening; the record would come after.

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