Dream d2961-s: Full, Ordinary, Unentered

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was standing on the middle street of Galestead Town at the middle of the working day, and the street was full.

The Registrar's sheet named it plainly: Galestead Town, row forty-one, one of a hundred and twenty-nine. I had carried that name for months across other roads, through cold houses and past lit windows I had not entered. Now I was inside it, or at least on its main street, which is not the same as inside.

Lano walked beside me, her nose down, reading the stone flags in her own order. She paused at a cart wheel, sniffed the hub, moved on. Rurik had taken the far side of the street. I could see his black shape threading between legs, finding the narrow channel where the crowd thinned. Neither of them had any interest in the column of names on the sheet. That was mine to carry.

I set those three words beside each other: full. Ordinary. Unentered.

Full, because every window was lit and every doorway had a person in it or a person passing through it. A baker's tray went past my shoulder. Two women stood arguing about a measurement at a cloth stall. A man with a barrow called out for room and people gave it to him without looking up. The middle of the day in a working town is not theatrical. It does not know it is being observed.

Ordinary, because I had expected something to mark the moment of first entry, some change in the quality of the light, some difference in the smell of the air. There was none. The street smelled of bread and wet stone and horse. The light was the light of late morning in early autumn. A town that has been kept and used and lived in for a long time does not announce itself. It goes on.

Unentered, because that is what the second column said, and the second column is made only of places I have actually walked into and written from inside. Galestead Town had been in the first column, the long one, since before this road began. It had been named, counted, described. The Keeper had sent notes about its layout. The Surveyor had marked its position. I had read those notes. Reading notes is not entering.

Lano sat down beside a post and waited. I took out the sheet and wrote the date, the street name, the time, the weather. I wrote: first entry. I added Galestead Town to the second column. The first column stayed at a hundred and twenty-nine. The second moved to forty-nine.

Rurik had climbed to the top of a window ledge on the far side of the street and was watching a pigeon three feet away, amber eyes at full stop. The pigeon did not move. Rurik did not move. The street moved around them both and neither one of them marked its presence.

I had been in Galestead Town for three nights. I had slept in the Innkeeper's upper room. I had eaten in the common room. I had sat in the yard at dusk. None of that had counted as entering in the sense the Registrar meant, because none of it had been done from the inside of the street itself, at the hour the street was most itself.

The middle of the day, in the middle of the street, is when a working town is what it is. I had walked into it. That was the whole of what I was recording. Nothing had been rescued. Nothing had been named as failed. The number had changed from forty-eight to forty-nine. Thirty-four working towns still stood lit and unrecorded, and those were for other mornings. This morning was accounted for.

Lano rose, shook herself, and walked on. I folded the sheet and followed.

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