Dream d3276-s: The Lamp Between

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the bench at Rowanbrook was six nights familiar, the grain lifting at one end where I have learned not to sit. Lano settled beside my foot, her nose working the grass in slow patient arcs.

A sapling stood near the far post, maybe three handspans tall, its stake freshly driven into dark soil. I did not know when it had arrived. The keeper had set it there between one visit and another, or before any visit, or in some interval I had not witnessed. It stood now, and the clerk wrote it down.

The clerk sat across the small table with the lamp set between us, its amber throwing our shadows long along the bench slats. A letter lay on the table, sealed once and now open, the fold worn at its crease. The clerk recorded the sapling: height, stake condition, the direction it listed toward the wall. Then the letter: condition of paper, number of pages, the date written on its first line. No question about what it contained. The pen moved and the record filled.

Lano lifted her head. Somewhere past the hedge a night bird called twice. She tracked the sound without rising. "Bueno," she said, soft, and set her chin back on her paws.

The garden carried the smell of cut grass from earlier in the day, under it something damp and mineral from the beds along the wall. The keeper had gone inside. A window glowed above the bench, warm and still. Nothing moved in it.

I have sat here five nights before this one. The bench was the same. The lamp was the same. The first time the garden felt emptier, though I could not say now what was missing. The sapling was not here. The letter was not here. They came between then and now, and the clerk has put them in the record without asking how.

The record has gone on. The distant reader holds it somewhere past the reach of this lamp, in a room I have not entered. Nothing returns from there. The place goes on without it.

The clerk blotted the page. Lano shifted and pressed her shoulder against my ankle. The night bird called once more, and this time she did not track it.

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Artwork instructions

IMAGE PROMPT: pixel art a human figure at a garden bench, The clerk records the sapling and the letter and does not ask about either., muted moss and umber, lamplight amber accents, 8-bit style