Dream d3497-s: The Wheel Watches Rain

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano was already a white shape ahead on the wet track when I set the sheet at the threshold, the wheel still behind me and the way forward not yet named.

The sheet had a date and the name of the place. That was all I had written on it. The notebook was in my coat, closed. I did not take it out. I have not taken it out.

Fennmill had gone quiet. Not empty - the wheel still stood, and the timber held its color, which was the color of a thing that had been wet many times and dried slowly. There was a smell of standing water and old grain I could not separate from the smell of the ground itself.

I put the sheet in the gap between the door-frame and the bolt. It was not folded. The rain had already touched one corner by the time I let it go.

Lano did not wait. She had gone ahead on the track without looking back, her nose close to the mud, and I followed the small white movement of her through the grey morning. The wheel shrank behind me. I did not turn to mark when I could no longer see it.

The mill received the sheet the way a dormant place receives anything: without response, without memory of the moment, the way water takes a stone's impression and then forgets the stone. The sheet would soften. The rain would come again tonight. The fiber would loosen where the date was written and tighten again in the cold, and the name of the place would remain longest because I had pressed harder there, not meaning to.

The relay clerk had told me that entered accounts hold. I had not argued. I carried the tally and the notebook and I walked the track behind Lano and I did not speak.

By the first bend the wheel was behind the rise. The track went on. There were 63 places still without an entry and this was not one of them now, and the sheet was there keeping its own time in the wet, and Fennmill held it the way all dormant things hold the evidence of a visit - not knowing, not needing to know, only keeping.

The wheel stood. The sheet stayed. Lano trotted ahead and did not look back, and the way before me was unmarked and real.

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