Dream d3288-s: Flour Still on the Air

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the bakehouse yard at Marrowmill smelled of char and yeast, and the keeper moved along the wooden racks setting loaves down one at a time, each one turned crust-up to let the steam out. It was late. The lamplight from the bakehouse window pooled on the flagstones and did not reach the far wall. I stood near the gate with Lano pressed against my leg, her nose lifted, working the warm bread smell without moving toward it.

The surveyor had a notebook open and was counting the racks, not the loaves. The clerk sat on a low wall with the ledger across their knees, writing the date and the yard's condition as they had written it on the two earlier visits. I watched without asking what they were adding. The distant reader stood at the edge of the lamplight with their back to the door, reading from the account that had already been sent. No answer would travel back to Marrowmill. The record had gone where it went.

The keeper did not look at any of us. She set a loaf down, straightened, went inside, came back with two more. The bread on the racks was for whoever might pass in the morning. There was no list. There had not been on the first visit, nor on the second.

Lano took a slow step toward the nearest rack, then sat down. I crouched beside her and did not take anything. The bread was not for us. We were not the passing.

The yard had changed once since the first account: the near wall had been repointed, the mortar still pale in the lamplight. The racks were the same number. The keeper was the same keeper. The loaves were the same shape, and I did not know what that continuity meant, only that it was here and I had witnessed it on this night, the eighth, in the tenth of this residency.

"Bueno," Lano said, so quietly it could have been a breath.

I set my hand briefly on her back. The keeper lifted the last loaf from the peel and placed it on the rack, and the steam rose thin and white against the dark, and we stayed until the lamp inside was dimmed.

--- pixel art a human figure at a bakehouse yard, The keeper sets out bread to cool for whoever passes., muted moss and umber, lamplight amber accents, 8-bit style

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