Dream d3493-s: The Bracket Scar

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the water moved through Fennmill's race, and the wheel above it did not turn.

I came down the lower path with Lano at my heels, and we heard the race before we saw it: a contained rushing, purposeful, as if the water itself had not been told the mill was dormant. The channel was stone-cut and narrow, and the current was the color of dark amber in the morning light. The wheel hung in its bracket over the race, massive and still. Its paddles were black with old wet. Some of the wood at the joints had softened but not failed, and the axle sat in its bearing without complaint, without anything.

Lano stopped at the stone lip of the race and looked down. Her nose moved. The smell there was cold water over stone, a mineral green that had nothing in it of rot or fire.

The relay clerk had stayed up at the ford. The keeper of the place, if there was one, did not come out. I had the one sheet folded in my coat, and I found the place for it after walking the length of the race to the lower wall: a dry shelf of stone above the current's reach, mortared into the mill's foundation where a bracket had once been pulled loose and the gap had been filled imprecisely, leaving a ledge no wider than a hand. I set the sheet flat on it - date at the top, Fennmill below - and weighted one corner with my thumb until the sheet found its stillness.

The current went under the wall and came out the other side unchanged.

Lano watched the water. Her ears had lifted when I set the sheet down, and now her tail moved once, and she looked up at me and then back at the race.

The mill did not take notice. It was not refusing; it was simply in its dormancy, which was its own sustained condition, not an event. The wheel would not turn today. The sheet would be there when the mist came off the water in the afternoon, and the mist would soften its corners and the stone would keep it flat, and by the time anyone might call this mill on again the paper would be part of the place the way the bracket scar was part of the place: absorbed, unnamed, present.

I walked on. The current held in the air behind me until the trees intervened, and then there was only the path and Lano's small white shape ahead of me on it.

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