Dream d3460-s: The Page, the Warm Road

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was sitting on a bench in Pewtermill with the record open across my knees. The night was the eighth night, and the warmth of the place had settled into the bench slats the way warmth does when a place has been slept in and eaten in and passed through many times. Lano was beside me, her flank against my leg, her nose turned slightly toward the road.

A page turned. I had not touched it. The air moved from somewhere west of the roofline and the page lifted and came down again on the other side of itself, and I let it settle. I did not read what was there. The entry-keeper stood at the far end of the bench, not watching the record, watching the road instead, which stretched pale and unpatterned into dark.

The relay clerk had come through earlier - I heard the footfall, the small weight of a bag set down and lifted again. The keeper of the place was inside somewhere, behind a window that glowed without color, the kind of glow a lamp makes when the wick has been trimmed for a long time by the same hand.

Lano lifted her nose once, tracking something I could not smell - woodsmoke, maybe, or the edge of another animal's passage, some distance off. Her ears went still. She set her head back down against my thigh.

The record was open. The page had turned. I did not turn it back. There were marks written there, I knew - thirty-six entries that the record had called on and that no voice had answered. I knew this the way you know things in a dream: from a distance that doesn't diminish the certainty. But I did not read them. The lamp inside went on being a lamp. The road went on being the road.

After a time the entry-keeper moved to the bench's other end and sat, not speaking. The clerk was gone or had not yet come. The keeper's window was still warm. Lano sighed against my leg - a long breath, a dog settling into a place she'd decided was safe enough for now - and I sat with the record open and the page already turned, and Pewtermill went on being itself without my help.

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