Dream d3308-s: Yesterday Folded Over

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the bakery at Aldergreen was lit only by the lamp above the counter, and the keeper was already into her third loaf by the time I came through the door with Lano.

The paper she used came from a wide roll mounted on a bracket beside the rack. Each sheet she tore was printed - last week's date along the margin, a column of numbers, the top of some notice in small type. She did not read it. She settled the loaf onto the sheet, folded the long sides in, creased the ends flat, and tied the bundle with a length of cord cut from a spool she kept in her apron pocket. Her hands moved like someone thinking about something else.

Lano moved to the corner nearest the warmth from the oven door and curled herself there. Her eyes stayed half-open, tracking the keeper without interest.

The clerk was at the side table, not the counter, writing in a column book. The surveyor stood near the flour bins with her back against the wall, watching. Neither of them had been here on the earlier visits I could remember, but they fit the place the way objects fit when they have always been in a room.

I stood at the counter. The keeper set the third loaf on the shelf and tore a new sheet. This one had a name printed near the top - a town name, I thought, though I could not read it straight before the fold came over.

The account was already gone. The distant reader had it now, had read it under whatever lamp they kept for that work, had noted what the three visits added up to or didn't add up to. Nothing from that reading was coming back here. The keeper did not know the account existed. The counter, the lamp, the spool of cord - none of it had shifted.

That was the thing I was here to see. Not the difference between what the record held and what the place had become. The place had not become anything. It was doing what it did: the fourth loaf, the creak of the roll bracket, the cord cut exactly where the keeper's thumb landed.

Lano lifted her head once when the oven door shifted on its hinge. Then she set it down again on the floor and closed her eyes.

The keeper tied the fourth bundle and smoothed the seam with her palm. She tore another sheet before she placed the bundle on the shelf, already preparing for the fifth. The column of yesterday's print ran sideways across the paper, waiting to be wrapped around something.

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