Dream d3486-s: Rain Not Yet Come

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the yard was cold and smelled of wet slate and the mortar between the wall stones. The stacks ran along the far wall from thin to thick, the smallest cuts nearest the gate and the heaviest slabs against the stone at the back, each row sitting level and true. The splitter bench stood near the centre of the yard with its surface swept clean, the wooden frame pale where the dust had been brushed away, a few dark chips caught in the crack along the near leg.

Lano came in ahead of me through the gate and put her nose to the base of the nearest stack. Her tail moved once. The yard was quiet except for the sound of the keeper of the place working at the far end, a flat piece of cut slate balanced in one hand, tilted slowly against the sky to read the grain.

I walked to the bench and set the sheet on it. It carried only the date and Slatefield, nothing of what the account holds. The keeper did not look up. Lano came across the yard and sniffed the edge of the bench frame, then sat back on the swept ground beside my feet.

The wind came in low across the yard and lifted the corner of the sheet. I took a piece of cut slate from the nearest stack and laid it flat on the paper without reading it. The slate sat. The sheet did not move again.

The keeper came across the yard a little later, carrying another piece, and set it on the bench beside the first without pausing, stacking by the habit of the day. The keeper went back. The bench now carried two pieces of slate and the sheet beneath them, the way a bench receives what is set on it without asking what the work is for.

The yard smelled of rain that had not come yet. The cuts stood in their rows, thin to thick, each stack ending clean at the top. The entry-keeper was somewhere at the gate. Lano moved toward it and I followed. Behind us the bench held its weight, the sheet held its place, and Slatefield kept its silence in the way of a place that has kept things before.

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