Dream d3480-s: A Hand's Width

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sheet was small and the stone was not. I placed it at the edge of the flat fallen surface, where the lichen had thickened to the color of dried sage, and there was no wind to take it then. Lano pressed her nose to the stone's near face and drew back without a sound. The field was level and long and the light was going in the way it goes when the sky has already decided.

I walked on. That is the whole of the part that belonged to me.

By the next night the shard was moved. Not far - a hand's width, the way a heavy thing shifts when the ground has been considering it for some time. The sheet was not on the stone. The moss held the marks of water along the near edge where rain had crossed from one direction only, and the grass at the margin bore one shallow impression that might have been a hoof or the base of something set briefly down.

The place had four visits in the record and no name spoken aloud in any of them. The sheet carried the date and the name of Ospreyfield and nothing of the entry behind it. That was what the entry-keeper had written, and that was all.

There was nothing on the stone now except what the stone already had: the lichen, the faint groove where water had found its preference, the small darkness at the lower edge present in all four recorded visits. The sheet was somewhere in the grass or the rain had taken it to wherever rain takes paper when the field is dormant and no one comes.

I did not look for it. I did not open the notebook.

Lano circled the stone once with her nose low, then sat at the far edge and looked out toward the pale grass. "Quieto," she said.

The stone was flat and the shard was moved aside and the field kept going in the way it had been going. I walked to where the dog was waiting and we left Ospreyfield the way we had come in - without ceremony - and the field did not mark our going.

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