Dream d3304-s: What the Lead Still Holds

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the printing room was smaller than the smell of it. Ink had soaked into the walls over many years and now the walls gave it back at night, slow and certain, a darkness you could almost taste. The lamp on the composing stone threw a low amber square across the floor.

The surveyor stood at the stone, pulling type from a tray with two fingers, setting each piece face-down in the composing stick. The surveyor did not speak. Lano sat near the door where a draft came under it, her nose working steadily, her eyes half-closed.

I watched the surveyor's hands. The type went in row by row: the notice was not an answer to any message, not a correction, not a response to what had traveled out of this place before. It was a notice of hours. Of what door opened when. Of where an account could be left if no one was found. The sort of notice that has no origin in a particular conversation.

Aldergreen had been dormant when we came. The keeper had met us at the yard gate and shown us in without ceremony, the way one shows people into a room that has been used for its purpose all along. The presses stood uncovered. The trays of type were full. Someone had been working here before us and would work here after; the dormancy was a pause in breath, not an ending.

I held the sheet count on a clipboard while the surveyor worked. One hundred fifty places. Seventy-two of them spoken into account. Seventy-eight still waiting. Aldergreen appeared once in the spoken accounts, which meant it had already sent something and I had read it elsewhere, in a different room, in a different lamp's light. What I had read I kept. I did not bring it back.

Lano lifted her nose and made a sound low in her chest - not alarm, just noting. The keeper moved somewhere in the back of the building, a footstep and then silence. The composing stick filled up. The surveyor set a period at the end of a line and pressed it flat.

Outside, the night was long and the town continued without instruction. Chimneys stood against the sky. A cat crossed somewhere I couldn't see. The print would be pulled in the morning and the notice would go up where notices went and that would be its own thing, separate from the account that had traveled out of here before and been read already, in a room I had already left.

The lamp held steady. Lano settled her chin on her paws. The type was set.

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