Dream d3437-s: Seven Nights on Stone

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the square without its stalls was wider than I remembered. The flat stones ran to the edge where a lamplighter's post stood without a lamp, and beyond that the dark of the lane. Lano walked ahead of me onto the stones, her small white shape moving across the gray field in even paces, nose down, reading whatever the stones held.

The entry-keeper stood at the near edge with a ledger open. The clerk was beside her, a lantern in hand. The keeper of the place, known by his coat, stood at the far end where the grain stall used to anchor the corner. He was not looking at us. He was looking at the stones.

I opened my notebook. I did not read from it, did not explain it. I noted: the square, the stones, the post without a lamp, the keeper at the far corner. I noted the hour and the condition, which was dormant, and I wrote the word flat against the entry as a thing I had seen.

Lano had stopped at the center of the square. She sat down on one of the flat stones and watched the keeper. Her ears were up.

The entry-keeper made a mark in the ledger. The clerk lowered the lantern slightly so the light fell onto the stones rather than outward. There was no wind. The stones were cold to look at and probably cold to touch and I did not touch them.

The keeper walked three paces toward the old grain-stall corner, stopped, walked back. He was not counting, or if he was counting it was something I could not name from where I stood.

I wrote what I could see. Not what it meant. Not what it had been when the stalls were here, the vendors with their grain sacks and their early calls, the square full of a particular kind of noise that stones keep no record of. I wrote the square as it was now, flat and cold and still present.

Lano padded over to me and sat against my leg. I put my hand on her back once and then wrote the final notation: Umbermarket, the square, one evening, present.

The keeper was still at the far end when we left. The entry-keeper closed the ledger. The stones were behind us and they were still themselves.

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