Dream d3266-s: Each Change Its Own Line

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the parapet ledge at Quillbridge ran out ahead of us into the dark, the lamp the keeper had set in the corner bracket throwing a yellow oblong across the fitted coping.

The relay clerk had her ledger open on the stone. She ran a thumb down the previous entries - five of them, in four different hands - and I watched the lamplight catch the page edges as she found the blank she needed.

Above us, the new roof stood out against the sky. Not the old one, which had been open at the west end and let in the weather; this one was flush and neat, the tiles still pale where the mortar had not yet darkened. I said nothing about it. The surveyor walked the full length of the parapet and came back and said nothing either. The keeper, who stood beside the bracket lamp with her arms folded, said only that it had gone in before the rains.

Below the lamp, where the coping met the stair descent, one of the parapet blocks sat slightly proud of its neighbors - the reset one, worked back into its course but not quite flush, a thin seam of new mortar at its base. The keeper nodded when I crouched to look at it. She did not say when.

The relay clerk wrote the roof on one line. She moved the pen to the next line down and wrote the reset block. The two entries sat there, separate, not cross-referenced, not explained. Two things that had happened. Two lines because they were not the same thing.

Lano pressed against my leg and looked out over the ledge into the town below, where a light moved across one of the upper windows and then went still. She sniffed the new mortar at the base of the block and said, very quietly, "ya."

The clerk blotted the second line and closed the ledger over her thumb to keep the page.

There was no answer from wherever the record had gone. The place did not wait for one. The keeper extinguished the lamp when the clerk was done, and the parapet went back to receiving whatever the night brought - the new roof pale above us and the block set imperfectly in its old course - and Quillbridge continuing in the dark the way it had continued before any of us arrived to note it.

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