Dream d3374-s: The Warmth Before Asking

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the barn door stood open two fingers' width, and the warmth inside pressed out against my hand before I touched the wood. The air smelled of straw that had dried through one whole summer and been left to sit through another - not sour, not sweet, just old and enclosed and sure of itself.

Lano went through the gap first. She pressed her nose to the opening and slipped in, her tail flicking once before the dark swallowed her.

I followed, the notebook against my ribs. The clerk stood near the far wall with the ledger open, not writing. The surveyor had set a measuring line along the base of the central post and was reading the floor with slow steps, not looking up. A keeper moved along the far wall, checking the wood joints by touch, back half-turned toward something among the straw bales I could not make out from the door.

One high window caught the last of an outside glow and laid it across three rows of straw in a warm amber bar. Lano had already found that light and was investigating the base of a bale with her whole face pressed close, turning once to check that I was still there, then turning back.

I stood by the door. I had been carrying the notebook since the road before Harrowbridge, and before that since a place whose name I had read and not spoken. I have come here twice already - once in rain, once in the grey before rain - and both times the barn was what it was without needing to be explained. Now it was the third night and the straw was warm and the surveyor reached the end of the measuring line and stopped and looked up at the roof for a moment, then bent to note something in their own record. Not mine. Their own.

Lano found a smooth stone near the door post - river-rounded, pale grey - and stood over it, nose down, without picking it up. She looked at me. I crouched and took the stone and held it while I listened to the barn settle around the still air.

The notebook stayed closed. The keeper finished the far wall and went around a corner into the part of the barn I could not see from where I stood. The surveyor began a second line. Lano pressed her shoulder against my leg and did not move.

The warmth had been here before I came. It would be here after. The notebook was mine to carry.

---