Dream d3492-s: The Wheel's Quarter-Turn

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mill sat at the bottom of a lane that nettles had narrowed from both sides. Lano went through first, her white coat brushing the last of them, and I came after with the sheet once-folded in my coat pocket.

The door was off its lower hinge. The wood had softened at the frame and the door had leaned open, not broken so much as given up, the way old things sometimes just stop holding. A gap wide enough to enter if you turned sideways. Beyond it: the millstone floor, the old chute, the dark where the rafters met. Flour-dust still moved in the air, or something that behaved like flour-dust. The smell of grain and water held together, the way they keep each other long after milling is done, as if the work had pressed itself into the wood.

The wheel stood outside in the race. Its paddles had grown to moss, thick and dark, and the water ran beneath them and through and past without catching. The wheel had not fallen. It had settled to a rest position, as if it had found the one angle where nothing more was required of it.

Lano stopped at the gap in the door. She sat down facing in, ears forward, nose reading the still air inside. She did not go further.

I placed the sheet on the flat threshold stone, the one worn smooth by feet across many seasons. A date. The name of this place. Nothing of what the ledger carries behind it. I set it down and stepped aside.

For a while nothing happened.

Then the water in the race shifted, not rising, not breaking, just the ordinary settling of water finding its level, and the wheel turned once: a slow quarter-turn, each paddle lifting and dripping before it stopped. A sound like weight finding rest. Then stillness.

The sheet lay on the threshold stone. One corner lifted in the air that came through the broken door and settled back.

Lano looked once over her shoulder at me, then back to whatever the dark inside the mill was saying.

The wheel had found its rest. The flour-dust moved in the rafters and was still.

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