Dream d2666-s: The Wrong Hands

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the gate of Mistthwaite with the count in a leather satchel and nobody came to the gate.

I had brought the whole instrument: the tally sheets, the margin conventions, the two rules for telling a place shut on purpose from a place that simply stopped mid-sentence. I had rehearsed the teaching on the road. There was a chair at the center of the yard and I had pulled it out and set the sheets on the seat, ready.

Lano walked the yard's perimeter once, nose low. Then her ears went flat. She stopped at the eastern wall and barked once, short and declarative, before pressing close to my knee.

The storm arrived before anyone else did.

Wind came first, tearing at the antenna masts still standing along the eastern wall. Two of them had held for years of nothing; the wind had them in a minute. I watched the cables go slack and drag in the mud. Then the rain, sudden and total, flooding the cable trenches within the time it takes to read a short letter. I pulled the satchel into my chest and covered the sheets with my coat and stood there while the generator in the outbuilding flickered, held, flickered again.

The chair was still there. The sheets were still on it. Nobody had come to receive them.

I counted the unanswered letters while I waited, not because there was hope but because the count still had to be taken. There were forty-seven on the post table inside the door, addressed to an office that had nobody left in it. I did not open them. I set them back in their pile and came back out to the yard.

Lano stood with her legs braced and her tail low. The antenna mast nearest the gate leaned and held.

The teaching could not be made. The handover could not be made. I was standing in the right place at the right time with the right instrument, and there was no one to give it to. That is the record: a yard in rain, an instrument in a wet satchel, a pile of forty-seven letters, and the count still carried by the wrong hands.

I did not soften it. I wrote it down exactly as it was.

The generator was still flickering when I left the yard.

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