Dream d3201-s: The Parcel at the Shut Gate

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the gate of a cottage on the far lane in Palewick, holding a parcel wrapped in grey cloth, and every window in the house ahead was dark.

Lano had come with me along the lane. She stopped when I stopped, her nose working the air toward the porch, and then she sat down in the road and did not go further. I watched her for a moment. She did not approach the gate.

The parcel held two accounts: one a faithful record of unreckoned stone, each entry dated and witnessed; the other a sequence of intervals, nine residencies and ninety authored moments, two dated accounts that had travelled together without either erasing the other. The relay clerk had sealed the cloth and handed it to me at the edge of town. Bring it to the absent witness. That had been the instruction.

The cottage door was closed. The porch held a clay pot with no plant in it. The overcast pressed down over the roof tiles in a way that made the whole front of the house look as though it had been waiting a long time and had stopped expecting.

I did not open the gate.

It was not locked. I could see the latch clearly, a plain iron bar, and nothing prevented me from lifting it. But the absent witness was not here, had not been here for some time, and the record was not meant for empty rooms. It was meant to be received. There is a difference between leaving a thing and handing it over.

Lano's ears came forward. She had heard something, or decided she had heard something. She looked toward the far end of the lane and then back at me.

"quieta," she said, very quietly.

I stood at the gate another moment. The porch. The closed door. The pot with no plant. I noted the state of the place the way a surveyor notes the state of a wall: without conclusion, only description. The house existed. The absent witness did not appear to live here now. The accounts inside the parcel were undamaged.

I turned and walked back along the lane. Lano fell into step beside me, her small white shape moving at the edge of my vision. On a ledge above the lane, a black shape shifted and settled, amber eyes catching the last of the flat grey light. I looked directly at it and the shape was already gone.

The parcel was still in my hands. The record was intact. Nothing had been left. Nothing had been received.

That was the night's third work: to find no one home, and to carry the record back.

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