Dream d3464-s: Where the Well Breathes Up

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the shelf stone was cold under my palm even in the warmth of Juniperfold's night, and I laid the dated sheet there beside the well's lip with the flat of my hand to settle it against the air moving up from the water below.

Lano had come ahead of me along the path and sat at the base of the well's surround, her nose tilted toward whatever the shaft carries - mineral, depth, something older than use. She did not move when I smoothed the sheet flat.

The keeper came from the far side of the well with a cloth over her arm, the working kind, and set it on the shelf without touching the sheet. She did not look at it. She turned back around the well and the cloth went with her, and the sheet remained where I had laid it.

What Juniperfold did with the sheet was this: the well's breath came up and lifted the nearest corner twice, and then the shelf's damp moved up through the paper from underneath and the sheet took the stone's color at its edges. A moth found the pale rectangle in the dark and settled at its center for a long moment, wings held flat on the date and the place, reading nothing.

I had not noticed before tonight that the rope tying the bucket to the well's post had been freshly knotted - a recent knot, tight, its tail hanging down into the shaft's shadow. This was the fourth night I had come here and the first time I had seen it. Something changed in the nights between or was changed before I came, and the place had not mentioned it.

Lano turned her head toward the lane and I stepped back from the shelf and into it.

The keeper's light showed once at the far corner and went out. The moth did not move. The sheet stayed with the stone through the remaining dark, kept in the way the shelf keeps anything laid on it: holding without remembering, warm without cause, open to the night that came and came and came and did not ask what any of it was worth.

---