Dream d3466-s: The Sheet in the Warm

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the bench stood at the edge of the washing green, the ledger open across the relay clerk's knee, and the lines behind us holding damp linen in the evening air. The relay clerk wrote the date first, and beneath it the name of the well, and moved the sheet to the dry end of the bench where the stone coping had thrown no shadow. Nothing else went onto it.

Lano had found a patch of flagstone near the well and lay there with her head on her paws, watching the near distance.

The well was old enough that the stone around its lip had been worn to a different surface from the path-stones - a finer wear, from hands rather than feet. Its cover was in place. The ground around it was pale and compacted, the way a place is when it has been approached daily for a very long time, by people who did not think of approaching it.

The relay clerk rose and walked off down the lane, the ledger under one arm. I sat with the sheet on the bench and a stone at its corner, the notebook closed and resting beside me.

The keeper came from the small building at the far side with a bucket, crossed without looking at the bench, lowered the bucket into the well and brought it up, and went back. The door closed. Nothing about the bench had drawn their eyes.

The wind moved through the lines an hour later and the linen lifted and fell. The sheet rose once at its near corner, the fold showing, and the stone held it.

Lano stood and turned a circle and settled again with her back to the well.

The warm was in the ground by then - the late kind, the kind that comes up into flagstone where fires have been lit indoors for a long time, where the same door has been opened to the same yard each morning. It moved into the bench planks and into the stone that kept the sheet and into the sheet itself, the date facing up.

By dark it had become part of the bench the way a thing does when no one has moved it and no one has needed to.

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Artwork instructions

IMAGE: pixel art a human figure at a bench in Juniperfold with the ledger open and the washing lines behind, The relay clerk writes the date and the well and the sheet moved out of the wet and nothing else., muted moss and umber, warm amber accents, 8-bit style