Dream d3251-s: The Road Holds Still

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the fen road came up through the dark the way it always did, the reed beds on both sides releasing a slow cool exhale, the smell of peat and standing water moving in from the left where the channel ran. I did not know what the record had said when it was read. That was not mine to know. The pack sat against my spine the same as it always had, but the weight of the folded pages was gone, and I did not reach back to check for them.

Lano came up beside me, nose down at the edge of the road where the mud began. She lifted her head and trotted ahead, then stopped at the place where a lamp post stood at the first crossing. The lamp was lit. It had been lit before. The keeper stood at the far edge of the lamplight, not coming forward, watching the dark in the direction of the water.

I walked through the pool of amber light. The keeper did not speak. I did not speak either. The surveyor was somewhere back along the road. I had heard the soft knock of instruments some minutes before, and then nothing. The relay clerk had stayed at the crossing house. I had come ahead.

The road bent left. I let it take me.

The reeds held their silence, the kind that is not absence but accumulation, all the nights this road had been walked before sitting still in the stalks. Water moved somewhere beneath the bank. Lano paused and I heard her sniff once, twice, then she was moving again, her white shape catching what little the sky gave back.

The pack was lighter and I did not shift it.

At the second bend the road widened and a low wall of stone ran along the south side, the same wall, the same moss in the joints. I put my hand along it as I passed and felt the cold damp there, the grit, the exact particular roughness of that stone. Not to confirm anything. Just to feel what was there.

Lano sat down by a flat stone at the wall's end. She looked back toward the lamp, then forward into the dark where the road continued. Her ears were up.

The fen went on breathing. I walked on.

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