Dream d3489-s: Two Slates, Nothing Else

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the relay clerk had already set the ledger open on the low wall before I arrived, the pages held flat by her forearms while she wrote. The light was low, that particular gray that comes off wet slate before dusk, and Lano had settled at the base of the wall with her chin on her paws, watching the clerk's hand move.

The clerk wrote the date. She wrote the two slates, two particular slates that stood apart from the stacked rows behind us, leaning at a slight angle where they had been set rather than placed. She wrote nothing else. The sheet came loose from the ledger with a small sound and she laid it flat on the ground between the two standing slates, and then she closed the ledger and stood.

We left the way I always leave: without looking back until the path bent.

When I did look back, Slatefield had not changed. The two slates stood at the same angle. The sheet lay between them, white against the dark lichen of the surrounding ground. The entry-keeper was somewhere behind the wall. I could not see them but knew by the way Lano's ears had lifted and then settled again, unbothered.

What the field did was this. Wind came first, low and lateral, and the sheet pressed closer to the ground but did not lift. One edge found a pebble and folded under it by a centimeter. The lichen on the nearest slate continued its work. A bird passed without landing. The light changed twice: once grayer, once not.

By the time I reached the path's far turn, the sheet was the lightest thing on the ground and also the flattest, held between the slates the way anything set down carefully rests. Not placed but received. Slatefield did not read it. The field did not pass judgment on what it held. It held the sheet the way it holds rain after rain passes: for its own time, in its own way, and without a word to anyone about what the weight was worth.

Lano had followed me to the bend. She sat down when I stopped and looked back one last time. The low wall was still there. The stacked slate behind it was still there. The sheet was too small to see now but I knew it lay flat between the two slates, damp at its edges by morning, and that no one would come to read it.

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