Dream d3470-s: The Rings Hold Still

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the paving at Cindersquare had been swept into rings, concentric arcs of clean stone around a center that held nothing, no stone, no mark, only the absence the rings described. The rings were unbroken.

Lano moved ahead of me along the outer ring, her nose low to the seam between one arc and the next, not crossing, following the curve. The keeper of the place was sweeping. Not the square - the square was already swept - but the air at its edge, a short broom moving in the same circling motion the rings implied, as if the sweep were a habit the body continued past the need for it.

I took out the sheet. Date. Place. The sheet held nothing else, and I set it at the edge of the first ring, where the stone met the unpaved margin, and weighted it with the flat of my hand long enough for the weight to mean something, then let go.

The relay clerk stood at the far side of the square. She did not come closer. The entry-keeper was not present, or was present somewhere I could not see. I did not look for her.

Lano came back to the sheet and stood beside it. She did not touch it. She turned her head once toward the center where the rings converged on nothing, then looked back at me with the ordinary patience of a dog who has nowhere urgent to be.

The keeper swept the air. The broom made no sound against nothing. The sheet lay at the ring's edge and the wind did not take it; there was no wind. The morning light, still low, came across the square at an angle that lit the rings from one side and shadowed them from the other, so that each arc was half-lit and half-dark and the pattern was doubled and still.

After a time the keeper set the broom against the wall at the square's edge and walked to a bench on the far side and sat. She did not look at the sheet. The sheet lay where I had set it, and the rings went on surrounding their nothing, and the something the rings made of that nothing - the shape of kept attention, the labor of the unbroken arc - went on too.

I walked out along the opposite edge. Lano followed, her tags quiet, her feet on stone. Behind us the square went on being a place where care had been taken, and the sheet lay there, dated, placed, waiting for nothing except what the square would do with time and weather and the slow accumulating attention of a keeper who swept rings around what was not there and kept them unbroken.

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