Dream d3488-s: Slates Closing on Wind

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the splitter bench stood in the open yard at Slatefield, and I was near enough to see the keeper's hands move against the gray face of the stack before the first real gust reached us. Lano pressed against my leg, her nose working the air, ears pinned and trembling.

The keeper did not look at me. She bent to the top slate of the bench, fingers finding the familiar seam, and lifted it clean. Beneath, folded as I had left it, lay the sheet - a date written on it, a place name, and nothing further. I had tucked it there the night before and walked on; it had slept through the workday under the weight of slate.

She picked it up. Held it without opening it. Her thumb moved once across the surface, feeling the paper's grain or the crease where I had folded it, and then she set it back between the slates and lowered the top slab into place. The whole thing took less time than a breath held.

The antenna mast above the generator shed chose that moment to speak - a low metallic keening as the wind found the guy-wire and drew it like a string. Rain had not yet come, but the trench running along the eastern wall of the workyard was already dark with runoff from somewhere higher. A light in the cable shed was steady, then absent, then steady again.

Lano barked once, sharp, directed at the mast, and then was silent, watching it.

The keeper straightened from the bench and stood with both hands loose at her sides, reading the sky above the ridge. She did not speak. The yard around her held the bench, the stacked stone, the outbuildings with their painted cable routes, and all of it went on holding as it had. The sheet was between the two slates in the dark of the stack.

The generator light steadied and then dimmed. Somewhere across the yard, a cable trench filled and overflowed against a doorstep. The guy-wire keened again and the mast leaned one degree into the gust - I watched it, waiting for the lean to stop or continue, and in the dream it had not stopped when I woke.

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