Dream d3458-s: Lano Already Ahead

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we left Pewtermill in the early dark before the light had separated the houses from the sky.

Lano was already on the road ahead of me, her small white shape moving through the grey, nose down, then up, reading the morning the way she does, without ceremony. I had the notebook in my pack. I had not opened it. At some point in the residency I had stopped thinking about who should open it, and now it sat among my other things, closed, and the road received us.

The entry-keeper had been at the gate when we passed. She did not say anything. She watched the record go with us the way one might watch rain move off the moor - noting it, not preventing it. The gate settled behind us with the particular sound of Pewtermill's iron, which is a sound I will know again if I ever hear it.

In the record: thirty-six entries called on and never once named aloud. I had not read those back to anyone. I carried them the way one carries a sealed letter that was never addressed - present, closed, of no use to this particular morning.

The town held a hundred and fifty-seven places. Forty-six had been spoken in one form or another. The rest continued in their own arrangements. A butcher's threshold still dark and bolted. A lane between buildings where the moss grew flush to the stone and thin water ran along the gutter with no one to name what it was running toward.

I did not go back to look at it. Lano had already crested the first rise. I followed.

The air smelled of standing water and something mechanical from the lower town - a pump or a press still running before any workers arrived to watch it. The relay clerk had been gone from his window since the previous afternoon. The record had been closed in the usual way, with a line and a date, nothing else. The entry-keeper had witnessed it. I had signed.

On the road the light began to separate things. Lano's coat caught it and she was suddenly very bright against the grey, trotting at a steady pace, tail up, ears moving at sounds I could not parse from this distance.

Pewtermill did not watch us go. It went on with its own account: the bolted shop, the running water, the press in the lower quarter making its sound into the morning. A hundred and fifty-seven places. Sixty-eight entries unentered. The record closed.

Lano waited at the bend. I caught up to her and she moved on, and I moved on, and the town was behind us, entire in its own going, unchanged by our leaving.

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