Dream d2661-s: What Outlasted the Hands

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the approach road was wide enough to have mattered once. Stone pavers worn smooth in the center, rougher at the edges. I walked the center. Lano walked at my left, her white coat catching what was left of the sky, her nose low and reading the cold air ahead of us.

The satchel was empty. I had checked it three times before leaving the last settlement. Nothing to deliver. The strap sat slack across my shoulder.

The ruin announced itself before it came into view: a smell of old paper and beneath that the particular weight paper takes on when it has been wet and dried many times over. Then the gate arch, two columns still standing with nothing left between them except open air. I stopped there. Lano stopped. Her tail was low and still, not afraid, only paying attention.

The letters were in the room to the left of the entrance hall. The receiving room, judging by the long counter still standing there, its wood swollen and split along every grain. The letters were stacked on the counter and on the floor beneath it and in the window embrasures and down a corridor that led further in. They were in bundles tied with cord faded to no particular color. They were loose against the walls. Some had fallen flat and had been walked on once, when there was still someone to walk on them.

I did not count them.

I set the empty satchel on the counter. Lano pressed her flank against my leg and then moved ahead a little, nose working the corridor. I let her go. She picked her way between the floor bundles and stopped at the window and looked out at the road we had come in on.

The light went. I stood in the receiving room and looked at the letters and opened none of them and read no address and delivered nothing, because there was nothing to deliver and no one to receive it even if there had been.

The satchel stayed where I had set it. Open at the top. Empty.

That was the first night.

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