Dream d3191-s: Bound for an Absent Hand

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the relay clerk's table was long and low, and the light in Thornhollow came through a single window set deep into the stone. The oilcloth lay already folded around the record - two accounts in one binding, the stone entries from before and the nine residencies beside them - and the clerk pulled lengths of twine from a coil on a hook at the wall.

Lano sat at the doorway, ears pricked, watching.

I had been given a seat to the side but not offered a role in the sealing. That was understood: the record had passed through other hands before arriving here, and my part in this room was only to be present at the moment of its closing.

The clerk made the first loop slowly. There was a method to it - not decoration but certainty. The oilcloth pressed flat, the twine pressed against it, and each pass around the bundle added to a tension that the package itself would carry to wherever the absent witness waited.

Rurik came through the far door without announcement, leaped to the top of a high shelf, and sat there watching the clerk's hands with amber eyes that moved once for every movement and then stilled.

The second loop crossed the first at a right angle. The clerk tested it with two fingers.

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This was the part I had been asked to witness: not the contents, which I had not written; not the meaning, which I was not equipped to settle; but the moment of sealing itself. The parcel would go to someone who had been absent for both readings - absent for the stone accounts, absent for the nine residencies - and they would receive it without the benefit of having been there. Which meant the twine and the oilcloth were doing a particular kind of work. They were saying: this is what we found. The record holds.

The third pass. The knot was coming.

Lano's nose twitched once. She did not move from the doorway.

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The final loop the clerk drew tight with both hands and the twine settled into the oilcloth's surface with a sound like breath. Then the knot: three passes, nothing decorative, nothing that would come undone in transit. When it was finished the clerk set the parcel flat, smoothed the surface once with a palm, and stepped back.

I watched from my chair.

No one asked me to touch it. I did not.

The parcel sat on the table between us. Thornhollow held its air. Outside, somewhere in the town's stone-and-shadow grid, there was a distance the parcel would have to travel before someone opened it and read what had been found. That distance was already inside the knot now, sealed in with everything else.

Rurik blinked once from his shelf and looked away.

Lano said, from the doorway: "Aquí."

Then she was quiet.

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