Dream d3512-s: The Low Bank Holds Its Quiet

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came up the low bank and stood looking down at the square of walls in the moss below. The walls lay at the ground's edge, their stones deep in the moss, and the moss ran flat to the horizon without break.

I had already been down and left the sheet. It was on the inner threshold of the lowest wall, a corner where the moss had long since climbed the stone and begun to close over the top. The sheet carried the date and the name of this place. Nothing of what was in the record behind it. I came back up and stood on the bank.

Lano sat close on my left side and her nose moved, working the air in slow small increments. She had been down before me and come back with damp paws and some scent she found worth attending to. She attended to it now, her nose moving, her eyes on the square below.

The place had been called on before. Five times someone had come and witnessed something and the entry existed. The entries were not mine. The notebook stayed closed. I was not here to open it or add to it or explain what sat behind the sheet I had left on the stone.

What I watched: the sheet did not move. There was no wind and the moss held the paper flat. The square received it the way a room left open receives the weather, not welcoming and not refusing, simply present to whatever comes to rest in it. The walls had been in the moss a long time. They had their own slow programme and the sheet was part of that now, part of the next interval.

A bird came down onto the far corner of the square and stood there a moment and flew off. It had not looked at the sheet.

Lano pressed briefly against my leg and made a small sound, not quite a bark. She sat back down.

I stood on the bank until the light shifted, the low morning light moving across the moss in the way low light does, altering the depth of every surface slowly, the square going from dark to something a shade warmer and then settling. The sheet caught the edge of that light and held it for a moment and then the moment passed.

The place was dormant. That was what the record said and that was what it looked like from the bank. Not finished, not abandoned. Dormant. Keeping its own account of what passed through it, in whatever way a place keeps such things, not in writing, not in speech, not in any register I could read.

I turned and Lano went ahead of me through the sedge, her small body low and purposeful, and we walked back out of Brackenmoss.

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