Dream d3306-s: The Turned Sheet

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the porch bench at Aldergreen held the same grain it held the first time, the same split along the near plank where something heavy had once rested. Lamplight through the window frame. The surveyor's press sat at the far end of the porch, its bed inked and cooling, and the clerk stood beside it with the ledger open.

The keeper had come out earlier, set down a tin cup, and gone back inside without speaking. That was Aldergreen now: the cup left, the door closed, the lamp still burning by someone who did not stay to watch it. Lano sat at the top of the porch steps and watched the road. She did not bark. The road had nothing on it.

The surveyor fed a sheet through. The mechanism made its sound - the even press of type against paper, then the release - and the sheet came out. She lifted it and set it face-down on the bench beside the lamp. The clerk wrote in the ledger: notice printed. She did not ask to read it; the surveyor did not offer it. The record would hold the fact of the printing. That was enough for the record.

I held the lamp steady while the ink dried on the underside. The second witnessed visit, and this is what I witnessed: the act of printing, not the content; the keeper's cup going cold on the rail; the lamp held in my own hands over someone else's work.

Lano trotted the length of the porch once and came back. She pressed her nose to the edge of the face-down sheet, then looked up at me, then out toward the road again.

The place had sent an account before. The account had traveled. Nothing had come back, and the place did not wait; it went on without the posture of waiting. Dormant was not empty - it was a condition the place wore the way the bench wore its split grain, without needing the difference remarked upon.

When I set the lamp down, the light pooled in the split plank. The sheet lay there, face-down. Lano settled at my feet, her chin on the boards.

The keeper's cup was still on the rail. Somewhere inside, a window had been left open; I could hear the air moving through the room, touching whatever was in there, and going out again.

---