Dream d3256-s: Ink Before the Reason

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mooring bench at Fenncrossing was wet from earlier rain, the planks darkened almost black at the joints, and the relay clerk sat at one end with a lantern set close to the page. She wrote the date first, then the entry for the moved ledger, the words coming in that practiced shorthand that leaves no room for weather or explanation. I watched from the far end of the bench. Lano had found a stone at the water's edge and carried it up the bank, dropping it between her forepaws while she watched the clerk work.

The keeper came out from the gatehouse with a ring of keys that he did not use. He stood at the edge of the lamplight and waited until the clerk had finished the second line before he nodded and went back inside. No exchange passed between them. The keys rang once against his hip as he turned.

The water at the mooring was lower than I remembered from the first visit. The rope that had stretched tight across the bollard then hung slack now, one coil resting in an inch of dark water. I did not write that down. The clerk wrote what she was here to write, the date and the moved ledger and the condition code for a live site, and she blotted the page and closed the book before I had finished reading the rope.

Lano left the stone where it was. She padded along the bench toward the clerk and stopped short, nose working at the edge of the lantern's warmth, then turned and trotted back to me. The surveyor had not come tonight. There was no one to measure the water line or call out a number. The place went on without that.

The clerk folded the ledger into her bag and lifted the lantern. The bench returned to whatever color the dark gives to wet wood. I sat a moment longer. Fenncrossing made no sound particular to itself, only the rope moving against the bollard in the small current, and Lano pressing against my knee, and somewhere in the gatehouse the keeper setting his keys on a hook.

The record would travel from here. Nothing would come back along that same road. The place did not wait for an answer. It was already becoming tonight, going forward at its own pace, the mooring bench and the lowered water and the slack rope doing whatever they do when no one is watching.

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