Dream d3371-s: Thin Water at Last Light

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the rise with the notebook under my arm and the whole of Garnetbrook was a distant green seam and a hair of silver water threading through it. Lano sat beside my right foot. Her nose worked the air moving up from the brook, and she was still in the way she gets still when a place has said something she is still deciding about.

The relay clerk was behind me, turning over a small stone she had picked up from the path. The surveyor was ahead, standing where the rise dropped off, not measuring anything - only looking. The keeper moved along the tree line far below, a shape smaller than expected at that distance, and I watched without knowing if it was returning or leaving.

The distant reader had not come to the rise.

There were six accounts of this place already. I knew the number the way you know the weight of something carried since morning. The notebook under my arm had not been opened. I had not opened it. Nobody had asked to. At some point on the road it had come into my hands and it was still there, its cover worn along one edge where a thumb had been, though not mine.

The brook did not move the way it should. From this height it was only light. The trees around it were a solid thing, not individual. Garnetbrook was a country at this distance, not a place you could step into.

Lano stood and took a few steps forward, stopped, looked back. Her tail moved once. I followed her a little way down the slope until the angle changed and I could see the water was actually moving - not silver anymore but dark, picking up the last of the evening from under the canopy.

The surveyor turned when I came down. We did not speak. There was nothing to say that the place was not already saying by going on.

The keeper had stopped near the first trees. From there the rise would have been just sky and the edge of the hill, and I wondered what it looked like from that direction - whether the figure on the rise with a notebook appeared to be waiting, or looking for something, or doing neither, only present.

I put my hand on the notebook's cover. Not to open it. Just to know it was there.

Lano pressed against my leg briefly. Then she moved off into the grass and began to sniff along a row of stones that might have been laid deliberately or might have always been there.

The brook went on making its sound beneath the trees.

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