Dream d3510-s: Green Over the Given Date

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came to Brackenmoss in the hour before the light failed, when the peat was soft enough to print a boot and hold the shape until morning. Lano moved ahead of me through the sedge, her white coat catching what was left of the sky. The lintel had fallen long before any account I had found, and it rested now with one end in the earth and the other barely raised, a threshold that no longer marked a crossing.

I set the sheet against the upturned face of the lintel. A date, a place name, nothing else. I found a small flat stone and laid it over one corner to keep the edge down. Lano sat beside me while I did this, nose lifted toward the treeline, ears angled at something I could not hear.

Then we walked on.

The dream did not follow us. It stayed at the lintel.

The moss was not still. In the way of moss in wet ground it moved in the only way moss moves: slowly, without announcement, by absorbing the margins of whatever it encountered. By the time the dark came fully in, the lower edge of the sheet had softened where the moss met it, the fiber taking on a particular damp that was not rain-wet but ground-wet, the kind that comes from beneath.

Nobody came.

Not that night, not by the account the dream kept. The bog held its own sounds - water moving underground, something settling in the sedge. The lintel lay as it had lain, its face turned up, the sheet pale against it.

By the next night the small flat stone had moved. A handspan east, turned over, lichen on its underside now facing up. What moved it left no other mark. The sheet was still there but pressed lower on the lintel, one corner tucked under the lip of the stone's shadow.

The moss did not hurry. That was the quality I remembered when I woke: the deliberateness of it. The way a living edge does not press or insist but simply persists, each morning a fraction further over the given surface. By the time any further account might visit this place, the sheet would be under the moss, and the moss would carry nothing of dates.

It received the sheet the way standing water receives a stone: closing over it, adjusting, going still again.

The date was there. Then it was green.

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