Dream d3195-s: Given Without Reading

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the fork outside Thornhollow with a parcel tucked under my arm, the paper wrapping damp at one corner from the night air. The left road curved toward the stone district, where the surveyor had worked his way through 138 entries, each dated and signed. The right road ran out toward the nine residencies, toward the intervals that had been measured and set down in a second hand. I knew both roads. I had walked parts of both.

Lano sniffed the middle path. She took three steps forward, stopped, looked back at me, then put her nose to the ground again and moved on.

The middle road was narrower. It did not go to either record. It went to the room where the absent witness was waiting, the one who had not been present for the stone-taking or the interval-counting, who held no prior reading of either account. The relay clerk had told me: do not open the parcel. Do not summarise it at the door. Set it in the witness's hands and stand back.

I followed Lano down the middle road. The village was quiet at this hour. A lamp burned in a window above the cobbler's workshop. Rurik sat in the doorway of the transit house at the end of the lane, amber eyes open, tail wrapped around his paws. He did not move when I passed. He watched the parcel.

The absent witness's door was unlocked. I knocked anyway.

She was a small woman, seated at a plain table. She had not read the surveyor's notes. She had not seen the residency ledger. She looked at the parcel the way you look at something you have been told exists but never held.

I set it on the table. I said: the near account is in the blue cover, each entry dated by hand, each object named without inference. The far account is folded inside it, nine intervals, ninety authored moments, two dates on the same page without either erasing the other. That is all I know of what it contains. I was asked to bring it, not to explain it.

She nodded. She did not open it yet.

Lano had waited at the threshold. I heard her settle, the soft sound of a small dog lying down on stone, and then, once, quietly: "Aqui."

The absent witness set both hands flat on the parcel and said nothing. I stood back, as I had been told. I witnessed that.

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