Dream d3449-s: One Short Bark

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I laid the notebook open on the bench against the lower wall of Tamarackcroft and stepped back into the gap between the wall and the path. The page held what it held. The sky had already gone flat and gray and the stone of the settlement held the cold of it.

Lano was at my heel. Her ears were flat, not from cold. She had been watching the generator shed since we rounded the path's last turn and now she stood with her shoulder pressed to my boot and gave one short bark into the dusk, then went still.

The entry-keeper came out of the low doorway with a ledger under her arm. She crossed the yard without looking at the notebook on the bench and stopped near the shed. The relay clerk was already there. They spoke in low tones. What reached me: the word fuel, the phrase not enough to run past the week, then a silence that held longer than the phrase. The keeper came out last. He lifted the latch on the shed and looked inside and closed it again without speaking.

Tamarackcroft has stood long enough that its base stones are dark with lichen. The garden beds were cut back to their lines. Two visits recorded here, both witnessed. The place was dormant the way a place is dormant when its people are still in it but their work has contracted to staying.

Lano sat down. Her tail did not move.

The entry-keeper set her own ledger on the wall but not on the bench and wrote something with a stub of pencil. The relay clerk walked the perimeter of the shed and came back and said something about range, about how far the salvage lines would need to extend, and the keeper listened and said nothing and looked past the wall toward where the hillside darkened into tree line. The salvage grounds they knew were already stripped back. The question of how far was the question they were not yet answering.

I stood in the gap. The notebook lay on the bench with its page turned to the sky. Nobody came for it. The settlement went on making its small sounds: the shed latch cooling, the wall holding, the air drawing down.

Lano's ears did not rise. She stayed pressed to my boot and watched the shed door, and we waited.

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