Dream d3329-s: Moss Holds the Crossing

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the bridge was barely a bridge anymore. Three planks laid across a narrow ditch, and the moss had grown over each one so thickly that the wood beneath could only be guessed at. The keeper stood at the far side with a lamp, not beckoning, just present, the light pooling amber in the low growth around her feet.

I stepped onto the first plank. It gave slightly underfoot, a slow compression like pressing a thumb into damp bread. Lano went ahead of me without hesitation, her paws finding purchase where the moss was thickest, and I watched where she walked before setting my own weight down.

The surveyor had marked this crossing in the last account. I had read his figures and come back now to find the bridge the same width but somehow less certain, as if the weeks between had loosened what was already loose. The clerk stood at the near bank with the sheet folded against her chest, watching but not recording. What I stepped on was mine to feel; she would only write what I reported.

Tamarackmoss at night smelled of its own name: the resin of the larches carried damp in it, and the moss held a lower smell, something between earth and water that had no word in the register. I have been here six times now. Each time the bridge has given a little more.

On the second plank I stopped. Lano stopped too, ahead of me, and looked back. Her ears were up. I listened for what she had heard and heard only the distant reader's absence - the direction the account had traveled was empty, no reply coming back through that dark. That was as it should be. What was here did not require an answer.

I crossed the third plank to where the keeper stood. She did not speak. She raised the lamp slightly, and I could see where the far bank held the shape of tamaracks in silhouette, needles shed now, the branches bare and fine as wire against the sky.

Lano pressed against my leg.

The place went on in its dormancy: the moss breathing whatever moss breathes at night, the planks continuing their slow return to earth, the lamp's circle shrinking the dark without naming it.

I put one foot on solid ground and then the other.

---