Dream d3507-s: Eight Courses to the Gap

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the gap in the wall at Brackenmoss was low - hip-height, the kind a person steps through sideways, ducking a shoulder. The moss had grown all the way across the bottom sill, a pale grey-green rug thick enough to hold the impression of a heel, but no one had pressed there. The moss was even and unbroken.

Lano did not go through. She sniffed at the near side, circled back, and sat at my foot with her ears tipped forward, watching the gap the way she watches a door someone has left closed by accident.

I folded the dated sheet once along its length and set it on the sill, between the moss and the upper course of stone. The relay clerk's hand was there: a month, a day, a year, the name of the place. Nothing else. I stood back.

The air on the far side of the wall was the same air - the same grey afternoon light, the same smell of wet bracken and dark soil. But there was a stillness that did not come from this side. The moss did not move. The sheet did not move. Nothing had used the gap in a long time and it had learned to hold that.

A sparrow landed on the top of the wall three meters to my left and stayed without calling. I counted the courses of stone from the ground to where it perched: eight courses. The gap opens at the fourth. I had not counted them before tonight.

Lano made a sound - not a bark, something lower and shorter - and pressed her nose toward the gap without stepping over the moss. She drew back and turned and pressed her side against my knee.

We walked on.

The sheet lay on the sill. The place had it now. When the rain comes - and in this country it will come before the week is out - the paper will soften, the ink of the date will bleed a little into the grain, and the moss will take the lower edge from beneath, as moss takes anything that settles on it long enough. The place does not read what is given. It covers it slowly. It keeps it the way a threshold keeps a worn patch: without knowing the weight, but knowing it has been.

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