Dream d3383-s: The Crow Looks Once

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the yard stones at Ironbridge held the cold of the night before and the cold of the night before that, and I stood among them with the notebook under my arm, not reading it, not showing it, carrying it the way you carry something that has not found its place yet.

Lano moved between the stones, her nose tracking the base of each one, something old and mineral in the seams that drew her in close and then away. The keeper stood at the far end of the yard where two stones leaned into each other, doing nothing with his hands, which is what the yard required.

The relay clerk had come up from the lower path and stood at the yard's edge. He did not ask about the notebook. He looked at the stones the way you look at accounts you have already settled, checking that the settling held.

The surveyor was somewhere behind me; I could hear the small sounds of measurement being made and not spoken aloud. The moss on the north faces of the stones was the color of something that has decided to stay. Umber in the mortar courses. The amber of the keeper's lantern on the far side of the yard moved when he moved and was steady when he stopped.

The crow came from the direction of the iron bridge itself, or somewhere past it. It landed on the ledge edge of the tallest stone, the one the surveyor had been circling. It looked at the notebook under my arm. Not at me. At the notebook's spine, the worn corner of it, the way a book looks when it has been carried and not opened. The crow looked for three counts, maybe four, then lifted without sound and was gone over the roofline.

Lano watched it go. Mira, she said, very soft, and then went back to the stones.

The keeper moved the lantern to a hook on the stone's face. The yard went amber and then settled into amber. The relay clerk made a small mark in his own ledger and said nothing about mine. The notebook stayed where it was, under my arm, closed, belonging to the yard the way a stone belongs to the road it came from.

The place went on. I stood in it. The moss held its color. The crow did not return.

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