Dream d3249-s: Given at the Threshold

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the relay clerk placed two sheets of paper on the table and the absent witness did not look up from the first one for a long time.

Lano lay at the threshold, chin to stone, ears following the small sounds from inside: the scrape of a chair, the soft landing of the first sheet face-down, the lift of the second.

I stood behind her in the street, and the warm light from the interior fell across the doorway and stopped there, not reaching either of us.

The absent witness read the second date. I watched through the doorway: a figure at the table, both sheets held now, one in each hand, tilted slightly toward the lamp. The surveyor's dated columns were visible from where I stood but I could not read the actual text at this distance and did not try to.

The relay clerk stood to one side, having completed the handover, and waited.

What I noticed was that the absent witness did not move to reconcile the two accounts. They held them both, one date and then another, and the room was quiet in the way a room is quiet when someone is reading something that mattered before they were there to read it.

Lano's tail moved once, slow, across the stone.

I had not been asked to explain anything. The relay clerk had not been asked to explain anything. The two sheets were in the hands of someone who had been absent for both readings, and now they were not absent anymore, and the record was the same record it had always been: nothing added, nothing taken.

Rurik appeared from somewhere along the Cinderwick wall, slipped between my feet without acknowledgment, paused at the threshold where Lano lay. Lano did not lift her head. Rurik looked into the lit interior for a moment, amber eyes steady, then sat down at the edge of the doorway and washed one paw with slow deliberation.

The absent witness set the first sheet down and held only the second.

I remained outside. The dreaming did not require my entry, and I did not enter.

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