Dream d3285-s: The Color No Wall Owns

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the grain loft smelled of the same dry sweetness as before, cut through now with something sharper - the ghost of paint, not old, not fresh, somewhere in the three days between.

The keeper was up there when we climbed, standing near the far wall with her back to us, adjusting a rope that did not need adjusting. She did not turn when the boards flexed under our feet. Lano went ahead of me, her nails finding the rungs of the ladder with the careful deliberateness she has on unfamiliar heights, and when she reached the loft floor she sat and did not move, her nose working.

The hatch in the north face was blue. Not the blue of the sky on any day I have seen here, not the blue of anything in this building or the ones beside it. A deliberate blue - the color someone chose from somewhere else and brought here on purpose. The surveyor noted it without speaking, made a mark in her ledger that I could not read from where I stood.

The clerk was already crouched near the center of the floor where the grain dust had been swept recently into a ridge along one side. She ran a finger along the ridge, looked at her finger, looked up at the blue hatch. Whatever she was measuring was between those two things and she did not name it.

Lamplight from the lantern the keeper had set on a nail threw amber up across the rafters and stopped at the hatch, which held the blue perfectly without warming it. The grain dust on the ridge glowed faintly. Lano circled the perimeter of the loft once, slowly, and came back to sit near my foot.

The distant reader did not come up. I could hear her breathing below on the ladder's first rung, but she did not climb further. Her weight there, just below, like a held note.

There was a second hatch, older, on the east side - unpainted, the wood going silver at its edges. Nobody moved toward it. We were all, in our different ways, watching the blue one, which gave nothing back except the fact of itself: that it had been chosen, that someone had used a brush and a color from somewhere other than here, and that the loft was now divided into the things that had been painted and the things that had not.

Lano settled her chin on my shoe. The keeper's rope hung still.

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