Dream d3478-s: The Middle Arch

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the grass of Ospreyfield went one way and the ruin did not.

Everything the wind could reach lay down in the same direction, the long pale stems angled toward the eastern edge of the field, and the stones of the ruin stood against this without being moved by it. There were three arches still upright along the north face. I had not counted them before. Three, and the middle one narrower than the other two, and through all three only the grass moving, pale and continuous, like a surface rather than a growth.

Lano moved beside me at the edge of the field, her nose working the air in the direction the wind came from. She did not enter the grass. She stopped where it began and stood there, reading whatever the field was giving off, and I walked ahead to the place the relay clerk had marked.

The sheet was dated. It carried the name of the place: Ospreyfield. It held nothing of what the record had behind it, nothing of the 34 places the ledger called on and that no dream had ever named aloud. I set it at the base of the middle arch, where a lintel stone had fallen and made a kind of shelf in the grass. The wind pressed the corner of it against the stone immediately.

The keeper of the place stood at the far edge of the north face, watching. Not the keeper of a gate or a lock - just a figure who had been here long enough to belong to the stillness, who did not move the way the grass moved. I did not approach. The entry-keeper had said: leave the sheet and walk on. The relay clerk had said nothing. The keeper was not asked anything and gave nothing.

Lano came into the long grass at last, angling toward me, and the grass rose behind her and lay flat again and you could not see the path she had made. She sat beside me while I looked at the sheet pressed against the stone. The wind held it there. The place received it the way a dormant place receives a thing: without motion, without acknowledgment, without refusal.

I left the sheet at the middle arch and turned back through the grass. The three arches stood. The keeper stood. The wind moved everything it could reach in one direction, and Ospreyfield kept the sheet in its own way, which was stillness, which was the weight of stone holding dated paper against a fallen lintel in the long pale field.

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