Dream d3322-s: The Stop That Cannot Name Itself

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the waystation door stood open just enough to let the lamplight fall across the painted route on its outer face, and I stood in the gap between inside and out and looked at what was there.

The route ran in faded ochre across the lower panel, seven stops marked in small circles with names written beneath in a careful hand. Six names remained. The seventh stop was not erased but scratched through, not once but many times, as if someone had returned to it across seasons and found the scratching insufficient and scratched again. The wood beneath showed pale and fibrous where the paint had gone entirely.

Lano pressed her nose to the bottom of the door, then to the threshold stone, then sat back on her haunches and looked up at the painted panel without urgency.

The keeper was inside at a narrow table, not writing, not reading, only sitting with both hands flat on the surface as if steadying something that no longer needed steadying. A lantern burned low on a shelf behind them. The room smelled of pine pitch and something older, a damp that had come to feel native.

The surveyor had been here before me and left a mark on the doorframe in chalk - two short lines, a measure of some kind - and the rain had not yet taken it. I did not add to it. I looked at it and let it be what it was.

Outside the window on the far wall, the tamaracks had gone to yellow at their tips. The middle of each tree still held green, and the inner branches nearest the trunk were a color between the two. The transition moved at its own pace, not hurrying.

The clerk had taped a paper receipt to the inside of the door, folded once, with a date on the outside. The date was from a previous visit, the record of something handed over and carried away. Nothing had been added to it. The fold had softened with the damp.

I looked again at the scratched stop on the painted route. Whatever name had been there, the scratching had made it into a shape that named nothing. The circles on either side of it still pointed toward each other, and the route still ran through the gap where the name had been, connecting what came before to what came after.

Lano stood, shook once, and trotted a short way down the path before stopping to look back.

The keeper's hands stayed flat on the table. The lantern burned. The tamaracks went on yellowing at their tips, unhurried, not asking to be recorded, already in the process of letting something go.

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