Dream d2700-s: The Evenness of the Tread

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the stair at Mossfell was the only thing in the room worth looking at, and I looked at it for a long time. The dust lay even on every tread. Not more on some, not less on others. Even the way a floor is even when nobody has walked it in a season, and the dust has had time to settle without being disturbed, and then more dust has come on top of that, and then more still, and none of it has been moved by a foot or a hand or a draft from a door. The treads were identical from the bottom to the top. I counted them and I will not say how many there were. It is not important. What is important is the evenness.

Lano stood at the foot of the stair with her nose lifted and her ears forward. She did not go up. She looked up the way a dog looks at a thing that is larger than she is and not moving. After a while she sat down and pressed her shoulder against my ankle. The dust on the bottom tread was the same dust as the dust on the top tread. That was the whole of it. That was the fact.

A wooden banister ran up the left side, and the hand that could have rested on it had not rested on it for long enough to wear a path in the varnish. The banister was clean of fingerprints. The newel post at the bottom had a small scuff at ankle height, the kind that a boot makes when a person turns too sharply and catches the corner. That scuff was the only mark in the room that I could read as a mark. It was old. The dust lay on it too, finely, so that it was the same color as the rest of the post, and only the angle of the light made it visible.

The light came from a window at the top of the stair, a small one, and it fell on the treads in a slab that stopped three steps from the bottom and began again on the fourth and stopped again on the eighth. The dust in the bright parts and the dust in the dark parts were the same. That is what evenness means when no one has been there to make it otherwise.

I sat down on the bottom step. Lano stayed at my side. The wood was cold through my trousers. I held my hand flat over the tread and drew it back and looked at the palm. A fine gray, no more on one finger than another. I put my hand down again and did not move it. The dust would settle back. It would not remember me.

Somewhere above, a board ticked once as the house cooled. Lano's ear turned toward it and then away. She did not bark. There was nothing to bark at. The ticking was the house doing what a house does when no one is in it and the night is colder than the day was. The board would tick again later, or it would not. I did not wait for it.

The rule of the round is that I write down what is. The stair is. The dust is even. The banister is unworn. The newel post has one scuff and the dust covers it. The light falls in patches and the dust is the same in every patch. Lano is at my side and her shoulder is warm against my knee. The tread I am sitting on is the same tread as the one above it, which is the same as the one below it, which is the same as the one at the top where the window is. That is the record. There is nothing else to add to it.

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