Dream d2858-s: What the Column Holds

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the book was running out of columns. I had been at the desk long enough to see it: the rightmost column was nearly full, and the column to its left had names crossing into their second lines, names the page had not originally intended to hold. I took the straightedge from the drawer.

Lano settled under the desk, nose on her paws. Rurik had come in somewhere in the last hour and taken the upper shelf, a black shape in the lamplight, his amber eyes half-closed.

The straightedge went against the last printed margin. I drew the line slowly, top to bottom, a clean ruled edge. The ink dried while I moved the straightedge a second time and drew the bracket at the column's head. Now there was room for more names.

I opened the count sheet beside the book. One hundred and twenty-eight names in the book; sixty-four with a drawing under them, sixty-four still waiting with no ground ruled under them at all. Of the sixty-four waiting, sixty-three had gone in together on a single long evening; one had been there far longer, set down in a different hand-weight, waiting differently, the way a first entry waits when all the others arrive later.

Forty-seven of the waiting names began the same way as places already drawn. That was not a plan; it was what happened when someone named carefully in one direction and then stopped. The word-stock the book was drawing from could have made nine hundred and sixty names; it had made one hundred and twenty-eight. Thirty-one of the waiting names showed some sign of light against them in the ledger. Fifty-four had taken work inside the last thirty days. The busiest place standing under a waiting name had taken a hundred separate pieces of work in that same period. The work was not waiting on the name; the name was waiting on the sheet.

I wrote the column's heading. I did not begin filling it.

Rurik blinked once and looked away. Lano's nose lifted briefly from her paws, then dropped again.

The question the new column held was the same question the book had held since the sixty-third name went in the same evening as the sixty-second: whether the sheet was being asked to catch up. I ruled the second bracket at the column's foot, set the straightedge down, and sat with what the column now held - space, and a record that the space had been made. The book could keep running. The sheet had not been asked yet whether it would.

---