Dream d2710-s: Tools Where the Hand Left Them

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the bench at Mossness held everything the last hand had set down. The mallet rested on its side, head toward the window. The marking awl stood in a block of end-grain, handle up. Three chisels lay in a row, each pointing the same direction, as though someone had meant to return and finish a sequence. The bench itself was dark with long use, the wood compressed to something closer to stone in the places where work had happened most.

I opened the second book to the cold entry for Mossness and wrote what I could see. I did not explain why the mallet was on its side. I wrote that it was.

Lano pressed against my leg while I wrote. She had her nose to the floor beneath the bench and held still there a long time, reading something in the grain of the floorboards that I had no way to read. Then she lifted her head and watched the window.

Rurik had taken the warm spot at the bench's far end, where a small lamp had been burning until I arrived. He sat between the spoke shave and a folded piece of cloth and did not move when I came close to record them. I wrote around him. The spoke shave: set down blade-up, which was not safe but was how it had been left. The cloth: folded once, loose, not pressed. I wrote that down.

The entry for Mossness in the second book had one road out. The road ran north to a place called the Tillage at Fernock, which was also in the second book and also cold. I did not write about where the road went. I wrote that there was one.

The chisel nearest the window had a small nick in its edge that caught the lamplight. I wrote the nick. I did not write what had made it. To write what had made it would have been to add something to what I could see, and the second book holds only what is.

Lano moved from the bench to the door and sat there, her back to the room, watching the dark outside. I finished the entry. The bench held what the hand had set down. The book held what the bench held. That was all there was to hold.

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