Dream d3472-s: Under Stone, a Date

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the square was quiet in the way squares get when the vendors have cleared their carts and the stones have given back their heat to the dark overhead. The bench stood at the center of Cindersquare, its tiles laid in a pale herringbone that had shifted over time into something softer, the grout filled in by decades of grit. Lano moved ahead of me, her nose low, tracking the cool seam between tiles.

The sheet was folded once, flat: a date and a place and nothing more. I crouched at the bench and pressed two fingers under the corner of the loose tile - it lifted cleanly, the way something long-unsettled does when touched with the right intention, and I slid the sheet into the gap. The tile settled back with a small sound, a click like a letter slipping into a slot.

I stood and crossed to the far side of the square.

The keeper of the place came out of a doorway on the north side perhaps ten minutes later. She carried a broom with a short handle and moved along the outer edge of the benches without hurrying. When she reached the bench, she stopped. She looked at the tile but did not kneel. Her broom moved over the adjacent stones in slow arcs. She may have noticed the edge of the sheet at the tile's corner; she did not lift it. She swept what was there to sweep and moved on to the next bench.

Later, a boy crossed the square on a direct line that took him past the same bench. He sat on it for a little while, eating something wrapped in paper. The tile beneath him bore his weight without giving. When he left he left his own paper beside the bench, not under it, and the night air moved it two bench-lengths before it caught against a drain.

Lano had settled on her haunches near the drain and watched the paper travel.

The sheet stayed.

Cindersquare went on: the night traffic at its edges, the occasional voice at the corner, the lamps burning their ordinary yellow. No one lifted the tile again. The place did not name the sheet or send it back. It received the date and the place and kept them in the manner of stone, which is without comment, which is indifferent in the way that outlasts both the keeping and the forgetting.

I did not go back to the bench. I stood with Lano for a while at the square's far edge, and then we walked on into the rest of the night.

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