Dream d3424-s: What Held the Warmth

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the meeting room was smaller than I expected, and warmer. The bench ran along one wall, unpainted wood, smooth where hands had rested on it and rough at the ends where no one sat. I laid the notebook open on it and stepped back.

Lano trotted in behind me, her nails quiet on the floor. She put her nose to the base of the bench and worked along it slowly, reading something the room had put there. Her tail moved once.

The entry-keeper stood near the window. She did not look at the notebook. She looked at the window, which looked onto a courtyard where nothing was happening except the light moving. The relay clerk was by the door, holding nothing.

A keeper of the place came in from the far end. He was an older man with a careful way of moving, as though the floor was worth respecting. He went to the bench and sat at the far end, the rough end, and folded his hands. He did not look at the notebook either.

Nobody asked what it was for.

The room smelled of wood and something older, a resin or wax that had been applied to the beams a long time ago. The ceiling was low. I could hear, from somewhere outside, the sound of a gate opening and closing in a regular way, as though someone was checking the latch over and over, practicing or measuring something I could not see.

Lano settled near the keeper's feet. He glanced down at her, just briefly, and did not move.

The entry-keeper turned from the window and crossed to the bench against the opposite wall. She sat with her back straight. The relay clerk moved from the door toward the center of the room, then thought better of it and moved back.

I was still standing by the notebook. It was open to a page that meant something in the record, one of the entries called on and never spoken aloud. The notebook held that the way the bench held the wax smell, quietly, as a thing that had simply accumulated.

The keeper's hands stayed folded. The room went on being warm. The gate outside opened and closed again, and then stopped, and the silence after it was ordinary.

Lano lifted her head, ears forward, watching the door. Then she let her head rest again on her paws. Her eyes stayed open.

I did not close the notebook.

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