Dream d3495-s: The Stone Taken In

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cold came off the floorboards first, before the window had any gray in it. Lano lifted her head from where she'd curled near my feet, ears forward, but whatever she'd heard was already gone. The grinding stone sat where the keeper had left it the evening before, unchanged to look at, with the sheet pressed flat beneath it.

I slept again.

By morning the light through the high window was the particular color of flour dust held in still air - pale, diffuse, not committed to any hour. Lano had moved to the door and sat with her back to me, watching the gap beneath it. The mill table held the grinding stone just as I'd left it, except it hadn't. The stone had shifted a quarter-turn on its own weight, or on the settling of the building overnight, and the sheet was not under it.

I looked for it on the floor, in the seam between the table planks, in the corners where the wall met the stone flags. The entry-keeper came in from the yard carrying something in a cloth, walked past the table without stopping, and set the cloth down on the opposite bench. The keeper followed, ducking under the lintel, and went to the far wall where a ledger hung on a hook - not my ledger, which stayed closed in my bag. A different one. He did not look at the table.

The sheet was not on the table and not on the floor and the stone sat with its new angle as though it had always sat that way. Lano padded to the table and sniffed the wood where the sheet had been. Her tail moved once and stopped. I placed my hand flat on the same spot. The grain of the wood was ordinary, nothing written in it, no impression left.

The mill went on being dormant in the way that places go on being what they are when the thing that used them stops. The water outside ran past the wheel without turning it. The stone sat with its angle. Lano came back to my side and sat down, and I stood there until the entry-keeper came back through to the yard and the keeper's ledger went back on its hook, and neither of them had stopped to wonder, and Fennmill had done whatever Fennmill does with what is left on its tables.

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