Dream d3270-s: The Pane Still Lit

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the west road came up as the town had not yet finished with the morning. Quillbridge lay at our backs, its rooflines squared against a pale sky, and from the uppermost window of the relay house a figure stood watching: the distant reader, upright at the glass, making no signal.

The clerk had gathered the ledger at first light. The surveyor walked a few paces ahead, noting the grade of the road as habit rather than assignment. Lano moved at my side with her nose low, reading something in the gravel I could not smell.

The keeper had not come out. That too was a kind of record: the door was shut, the lamp in the downstairs room still burning, orange and small behind wavy glass. Dormant, the condition sheet would say. What had been wakeful here on our eight earlier visits, the smell of ink and warmed wax, the relay clerk's cough against the quiet, was quiet now, and the quietness was its own texture.

We did not slow as the road curved west. I did not look back, but I knew: the reader was still at the window. I had seen them there when we first stepped out, and there was nothing in the quality of the morning that would have moved them. The account had been sent. It had been read. What traveled back was only the fact of reading, and that fact arrived wordless, in the posture of someone standing still at glass.

Lano paused once, ears lifted, facing the building. Then she trotted forward and did not look again.

The road took a soft bend through a stand of alder and the relay house passed from sight. The distant reader passed from sight with it. Whatever remained between us, the record, the account, the witnesses' versions written in their separate hands, stayed on the page where it belonged. Nothing more was owed in either direction.

The fog on the low ground ahead was fresh and cool. The surveyor noted the distance marker at the road's edge. The clerk walked beside me now, and neither of us spoke.

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