Dream d3501-s: The Warmth Goes Out Slowly

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the trough sat at the edge of a yard in Quillfield where the paving gave out in dark soil and the hedge grew thick behind it. Someone had kept it clean: the dry bottom was swept rather than silted, and the rim still held the warmth of a day that had been mild. I set the sheet flat in the bottom, the date and the place name face up, and stepped back to where the hedge pressed against my shoulders.

Lano had waited at the gate. She came forward when I stepped back, stopped at the trough's edge and lowered her nose to the rim without touching the sheet. She drew a long breath, turned her head once, and came and sat beside my foot.

The keeper of the place came through a door at the far end of the yard carrying something wrapped in cloth, and paused when he saw us. He looked at the trough. He did not cross the yard or come closer. He stood a moment in the doorway and then went through a second door and was gone.

The sheet lay there. The trough held its warmth a little longer than the air around it - I could feel the difference when I held my palm near the rim. The date was yesterday's date and the name written there was the name of this place, and the trough kept them both the way it would keep a leaf or a feather: without doing anything particular with them.

Nothing moved inside the trough. The yard was quiet in the way Quillfield had been quiet across all four nights: not empty, only set in its own pace, one that did not change for being watched. The hedge at my back carried a faint smell of something growing inward.

We stayed until the warmth had leveled out to the same temperature as the air. Lano stood when I stood. The sheet was where I had laid it, the date and the name still readable in the dim light from the door the keeper had left cracked open behind him.

I walked out the way we had come in. The record had called on this place thirty-one times and never heard it called back. I did not call it back. I left the sheet in the dry bottom and the place continued with its warmth going out slowly, and the swept bottom, and the cracked door, and whatever the keeper had been carrying, and the particular way a dry trough in Quillfield holds a piece of paper flat in the dark.

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