Dream d2860-s: The Spine Read Nothing

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the candle had burned down to a stub and the wax had pooled and hardened before I noticed, which was how I knew I had been at the sheet a long time. The map room held the night in its corners. Lano was curled under the drafting table, her nose tucked into her tail, one ear still raised toward the door.

The sheet on the table showed sixty-four places named and drawn. I counted them twice, because the number felt like something to hold carefully. Against it: sixty-four names written in the far pages of the book, each waiting for a line, a border, a ground to be given them. One of those sixty-four had been waiting longer than the rest, entered in an older hand, in a different ink. The other sixty-three had come in a single sitting, someone working steadily through a clear idea of what the country held, then stopping. I did not know why the stopping had happened. That was not mine to know tonight.

Rurik slipped from the high shelf and landed without sound on the worktable. He turned once and settled with his amber eyes toward the far window, where the glass held nothing back of the dark outside. His tail moved once and was still.

I looked at the waiting names again. Thirty-one of them showed a light when I held the page at an angle - not a drawing, but something, work done in the vicinity of the name, the place acknowledged without yet being set on the sheet. Fifty-four of the sixty-four had been touched inside the last thirty days. That was the fuller number. Forty-seven of the waiting names shared their first syllable with a place already drawn, which meant whoever had named them had been thinking in a system, had been trying to say: these belong to the same country. The busiest of the waiting names carried a hundred separate pieces of work pressed against it in the last thirty days, and still no line drawn under it.

I set the candle stub aside and carried the book to the shelf. Lano woke when I moved, lifted her head, and watched. I slid the book onto the high shelf between two older volumes, spine outward. The spine read nothing that explained the stopping.

The sheet stayed on the table: sixty-four drawn, sixty-four waiting. Half and half exactly, which is either a resting place or a hinge. The book was shelved. I did not know which of those the number was, and tonight was the last night of the residency, and the question stayed open on the table where the wax had hardened and the candle was done.

Lano pressed her side against my leg once, then settled back under the table in the dark.

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