Dream d3375-s: Bale and the Floor Below

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the loft boards were dusty underfoot when I set the notebook down on the flattest bale I could find, open to a page that had been waiting since before Harrowbridge. Below, I could hear the keeper moving between the stalls - a slow count, nine animals by the sound of hooves shifting, though I had not counted them before tonight. I climbed down the fixed ladder, hand over hand, and Lano was already at the bottom, watching me come.

She had been there before me, as she often was. Her nose worked the air near a gap in the boards where the smell of something green and wet came through from the field beyond. The surveyor stood near the far wall with their back to the door, reading the slope of the floor with their heel, not speaking. The relay clerk had settled on an overturned bucket near the middle post, writing nothing, just resting their hands on their knees.

Three visits recorded, and tonight was the fourth presence - not a visit in the same way, more a residency deepening into the place until the place no longer looked up when we entered. The keeper passed with a pale lantern and did not stop. Lano watched the lantern go. Her tail moved once.

The notebook lay open in the loft above us. I did not go back for it. It would hold what it held; the barn was not asking to be told.

Warm in here, though outside the night was coming cold. I counted the beams overhead from the floor: seven, running east to west, the fourth one darker than the rest as if it had been added after the others, or had simply weathered a different way. Seven was not a number I had noted before. The distant reader was somewhere outside the barn, or had been - there was a quality of listening near the east wall that belonged to them, though I could not see them.

Lano sat down in the straw and pressed her side against my boot. The place went on. The surveyor's heel found something and they stood still. The relay clerk lifted their head toward the loft - not toward the notebook, just toward the height of the place, the way a person looks at a ceiling when thinking of nothing in particular.

Above us, the open page breathed in the draft from the haymow door.

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