Dream d3430-s: The Roofs in a Ring

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I sat on a bench in Rowangreen with the record open across my knees, the page turned to the account that had been called on and never named aloud. It was the seventh night. The rooftops stood in their ring around the green, pale umber against a sky that had gone from blue to the color of old wax, and the grass between the bench and the far cottages held a late warmth that the air was only beginning to give back.

Lano had settled near the bench post with her muzzle on the grass, nose lifted at intervals, reading something in the cooling air that I could not. When a sound moved through the passage behind us she lifted her ears and let it pass. She pressed her side against the foot of the bench and watched the green.

The entry-keeper had passed through earlier, checking the far gate without acknowledging the bench or the record. The keeper moved along a path that ran close to the fence line and did not look over. The clerk had been somewhere near the narrow passage at the east end of the square; I heard the soft close of a leather case, and then quiet.

The record held the account open. I looked at the page. Four visits marked in small columns, the condition noted warm each time, the place carrying on between them without instruction. The bench was there when I arrived and would be there after the week was done. A window that had been dark on the third evening held a light now. I did not write that down. The page was already full of what the record had called for, and the record did not ask me to add to it.

I closed the notebook. Not because anything had concluded. Because it was the seventh night, the page had been turned, and the place had already shown by going on everything I would have written.

I walked toward the passage. Behind me the green opened wide in the evening, Lano still on the grass, taking her time, and the rooftops held their ring around her - the cottages keeping Rowangreen in the way a ring holds the space it encloses: not by intention, but by arrangement, and without needing to be told.

The light in the window stayed on. The bench held its place on the green. The dog lay down.

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