Dream d2997-s: The Word for Swept

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I crouched at the bottom step of Kestrelhush with my hands flat on the stone, and the stone was clean. The Register had called this an abandoned hall; I had written that myself, in the third month, from a survey count taken from the road. The word I used was cold. The word I used was unoccupied. I had not written swept because swept requires presence, and presence requires entering, and entering requires crossing the road and climbing to the door, which I had not done.

Lano pressed her nose to the edge of the step where the bristles had left their track, her tail moving twice.

The record reads: Kestrelhush, cold house, unoccupied, roof condition unknown, window count seven. I copied this into the corrections ledger and added one word: swept. I wrote: OUTER STEPS: swept, contrary to record. I wrote: account at distance said cold and did not say swept; account at doorway says swept, cold question still open. I left the cold question open because I had not entered.

Rurik was ahead of me on the second step. He had settled in the gap between the door and its frame, which stood ajar, and was looking through. His amber eyes held the only warm color in the stonework.

The step under my hands had the smoothness of long use or long care, and I could not read which from the stone alone. I wrote: smoothness, maintained, origin unclear. I wrote: contradiction stands. I did not resolve it.

Lano had a small stone in her mouth when she came to my knee. She dropped it on the step and sat back and regarded it. I picked it up and set it into the ledger entry: stone, smooth, river-worn, carried in from the road, deposited at threshold, via Lano.

The door was ajar. Kestrelhush was waiting for nothing and resisting nothing. The swept steps said only that someone had once moved a broom across them, and that this was a thing that happened, and that it happened here, and that I had been on the road when it did and so had not written it down until now.

I wrote it down.

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