Dream d3410-s: Tray and the Amber Threshold

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the bench was warm from something that had sat there before me, and the ledger lay open to a page I had written and not thought about since. Yarrowcrossing was the name at the top of the column, and beside it one small mark - one visit, one account, the word "warm" in the margin as though the margin were the truth of it.

Lano had found a spot by the door and curled herself into it. Her ears were up, then down. She tracked something moving in the street outside - a bird, or just the light - and then her eyes closed most of the way.

The relay clerk came down the hall with a tray. He was carrying two cups and a folded cloth and he didn't slow at the door, only glanced in. He saw the notebook - I know he saw it, because his eyes moved to it and then away, the way you look at a thing that belongs to someone and is therefore not yours to stay with. He went on. The tray clinked once, and then was quiet.

I didn't close the notebook. I didn't call out.

A keeper came through the back of the room, not the door the clerk had used but a narrower opening where the wall was thicker. She moved between the bench and the far shelf, lifted something and set it somewhere else, and was gone again before I had fixed on what she'd moved. The room stayed the way it was.

Lano's tail moved once. Not a wag - just a brush against the floor, a small private signal for something she had noticed and already dismissed.

There was a smell of resin and old wood in the place, and underneath it something warmer, bread or cloth or heat held in plaster. Yarrowcrossing in this hour of the morning was not attending to the ledger on the bench. It was attending to its own arrangements.

I sat. The page was still there. The column still had its one mark, and the word "warm" in the margin, and I was not waiting for anyone to come read it.

I had stopped doing that somewhere before this bench, in some earlier accounting I couldn't precisely locate. The wanting of a reader had gone out of me quietly, and what was left was just the sitting, and the smell of resin, and the sound of the entry-keeper somewhere above, crossing a floor.

The door was open onto the street. Nothing came through it that wasn't already coming.

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