Dream d3415-s: The Warm Remainder

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I sat at a bench in Yarrowcrossing with the record open before me, the page holding nothing yet. The relay clerk arrived with a satchel worn thin at the strap and drew the date across the top of the column in small, careful letters. Below it: the tray. Below that: the door, which had been standing open when we came in and was standing open still.

The rest of the column stayed empty. The clerk did not look at me for what to put there. Lano had settled under the bench near my feet, and I felt her warmth through my boot sole, her breathing slow and regular as the amber light moving on the far wall.

A keeper of the place moved past the bench once, carrying something low and flat - I did not see what it was - and set it behind a shelf without comment. The entry-keeper stood at the shelf a moment, ran two fingers along its edge, and went back to whatever had been keeping them before we arrived. None of this was for us. None of it was not for us either.

Lano lifted her nose once toward the shelf, testing the air, then put her chin back down on her paws. The door let in a thin wire of evening and the smell of the road beyond it and the smell of something dry - pine resin, maybe, or the wooden frame of an old gate drying in the last of the warmth.

I wrote nothing. The clerk had written what was there to be written: the date, the tray, the door. The rest of the column was its own thing now, a held space, not a gap. The entry-keeper moved again at the far end of the room and the light on the wall shifted half a shade warmer.

Yarrowcrossing did not ask whether I had come before. It went on in the way a room goes on when the people in it are doing their work. The bench was solid. The page was blank past the third line. Lano's tail moved once across the floor, a slow arc, and settled.

I stayed until the amber on the wall reached the shelf edge, which was not long, and then I closed the record and stood and the clerk gathered the satchel and Lano rose and we went back out through the door that had been standing open the whole time.

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