Dream d3511-s: What the Gap Accepts

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we came to the gap in the wall at Brackenmoss in the late light, when the moss on the upper courses had darkened to the color of wet ink. The relay clerk set the ledger on the sill and opened it without ceremony, and the entry-keeper stood to one side watching the far field while Lano pressed against my knee, her nose lifted toward the lintel.

The clerk wrote the date. She wrote the moss. She wrote the lintel stone - a single flat piece, longer than my arm, the color of the field in November. She did not write what brought us or what the account held. She capped her pen and stepped back and I took the sheet she had already folded once, the date on the outside in her small hand.

I set it in the gap where the lintel met the jamb, where a shelf of moss had built itself flat and dry over decades. The paper touched the surface and stayed. Lano watched, her ears forward, her tail briefly moving.

The keeper came out of the building behind us - not from the gap itself but from a low door we had not been through. She did not speak. She looked at the gap and at the page resting against the moss and then she looked away, toward the far edge of the enclosure where the wall had collapsed to knee height and the field came through. She did not touch the page. She did not look at the ledger.

We left the ledger closed. I tucked it under my arm and the entry-keeper fell in beside me and we walked back out through the gap the way we had come in. Lano went ahead, her white shape going small against the track.

I looked back once. The page was still there in the gap. The keeper was standing where we had left her, her back to us now, her attention gone somewhere into the fallen section of the wall. The moss around the page had not moved. Nothing had closed over it or taken it. The place had received it the way a sill receives whatever is set on it and left - the way Brackenmoss in its dormancy had received four visits and kept the fact of each one in the condition of the ground, in the depth of the moss, in the way the lintel sat slightly lower on the left side than the right, as if the wall had listened for a long time and was still listening and would go on listening long after the page had softened into the fiber of what held it.

The clerk did not write that. She wrote the date. She wrote the moss. She wrote the lintel stone.

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