Dream d3481-s: The Pale Date in Long Grass

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the wind came first, cold and low through the field, carrying a smell of turned earth and something older beneath it. Lano walked ahead, her white coat catching the last amber of the afternoon, nose to the ground where the path had not been worn but was still somehow there.

The fallen gateway of Ospreyfield stood at the edge of the field, its arch half-dropped, one pillar tilted and the other planted in the long grass as though it had always grown there. The ledger lay open on the flat of the gate-stone, and the relay clerk bent over it with her pen, writing the date first, then the long grass, then the stone with nothing on it. I watched her hand move across the page. She wrote without hesitation. When she reached the end of the entry she closed the ledger and held it against her side, and that was all.

The entry-keeper stood a little back from the gate, watching the field rather than the clerk. The keeper of the place was not present.

I took the sheet from the ledger's last section. It held a date and a place-name and nothing else. I laid it flat on the gate-stone where the ledger had rested, set a piece of the fallen arch on its corner, and walked on.

Lano circled back once, stopped before the sheet, regarded it with the flat attention she gave to things that were still. Then she trotted after me without barking.

Behind us the field resumed. The long grass moved in the cold wind. The sheet stayed under the stone. A wren landed on the tilted pillar, turned its head once, flew. The gate went on being fallen. The afternoon went on going out. The stone held the date where the arch had once stood, and the grass came close to the edges of it, and the place went on being dormant in the way a field goes on: by accumulating the marks of what has passed through without asking anything of them.

By the time the path curved away, Ospreyfield was already just a shape in the long grass, and the sheet was in it, and the date on it was today's.

---