Dream d3325-s: Seven Pegs, No Coats

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the bunk alcove at Tamarackmoss smelled of wet bark and something older, a cold that had settled into the wood while no one was here to push it out. The lamp I carried made the grain of the lower bunk swim with shallow light. Seven wooden pegs ran along the wall above the bunk; I counted them without meaning to, the way you count anything that presents itself evenly. None held a coat.

The book of arrivals lay open on the shelf at the head of the bunk - a low shelf the last occupant would have reached without sitting up. The relay was there on its proper line, and below it someone had drawn a small line in a different ink, thinner and pressed harder, as if the pen had been steadied on something soft. The line did not annotate anything. It simply closed beneath the entry the way a ruled form closes below a signature.

Lano had come in ahead of me and was standing in the center of the alcove, nose up, reading whatever the place was still giving off. She made no sound. After a moment she sat, which is what she does when a place is waiting and she has decided it is safe to wait with it.

The keeper had shown me to the alcove and then receded; I could hear her in the room beyond, moving the same object from one surface to another, a domestic sound that asked nothing. The surveyor was somewhere outside. I had seen the relay clerk earlier, sitting at the main table with the ledger closed in front of her, not reading, just present.

I sat on the lower bunk and looked at the seven pegs. Three of them had small pale circles where varnish had worn away - coat hooks held, pressed against, released. Three visits recorded in the arrivals book; three circles of bare wood. The correspondence was not an argument, just a coincidence the place had made room for.

Lano turned once and lay down on the floor beside the bunk, pressing her side against the boards. I set one hand on the shelf and felt the cold in the wood, even through the shelf's thin smoothness. Tamarackmoss in dormancy is not a place that has emptied. It is a place that has put things carefully down and is waiting to see if they are picked back up.

Outside, the moss would be holding whatever night had put into it.

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