Dream d3262-s: The Folded Blank

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came back through the arch at Quillbridge on the second night, and the lamplight was the same shade of amber it had been before - pressed low in the iron bracket, throwing the stones into relief. Lano walked ahead of me into the shadow of the arch and stopped, her nose working at the dark.

The toll box was open. Someone had lifted the iron lid and propped it against the arch stone; it leaned there as if it had always leaned there. Inside, on the base of the box where coins would lie, was a single page folded once. Not folded tight. Folded the way a person folds something they mean to unfold again.

The keeper stood at the far edge of the arch, facing out toward the road beyond. She did not turn when I came under the stone. Her hands were at her sides. The surveyor had come earlier in the evening - I could see where his boot had pressed the moss at the edge of the road - but he was gone now.

I stood at the box and looked at the page. It was blank. Completely blank, both sides, the paper still carrying some of the whiteness of its making. Lano came and sat at my feet, close. She pressed her shoulder against my ankle and looked up at the folded page with me, but she did not touch it.

The record had gone out from this place. That was a thing that had happened. The arch was the same arch. The box was the same box, except that it was open, and the page inside it held nothing yet.

The keeper finally turned. She looked at the box for a long time. Then she looked at the road in, and at the road out. Quillbridge was quiet. The moss on the stones was damp and the smell of it came up into the lamp's warm circle. Lano's tail moved once, very slowly.

I did not fold the page again. I did not close the lid. The box stayed open under the arch because that was how I found it, and how, I understood, it was meant to be found.

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