Dream d3513-s: The Moss Closes After

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the track away from Brackenmoss was soft underfoot, the kind of soft that comes from years of water lying close to the surface with nowhere to go. Lano was already ahead - I could see her white shape moving through the grey morning, nose down, unhurried in the way she is unhurried when she knows the direction if not the destination.

I had left the sheet at the fallen lintel, the last square of dressed stone where the outer wall had been. Just the date and the place. I set it under a piece of slate so it would last an hour, maybe a morning. The place did not ask for it and I did not explain.

Brackenmoss does not hold the way some places hold. It does not grip or call after. What it does is close. The moss at the edge of the track grows a little over each footprint before the next one lands - not to erase them, but because that is what moss does when no one is watching. It continues. The walls I had slept beside for eight nights were already becoming walls again, without me in them. The morning light moved across the surviving courses of stone the same way it had moved across them before I arrived and would move across them after.

Lano paused at a bend in the track and looked back. Her ears were up, her tail still. She was not waiting for me to catch up; she was noting the direction, the way a good dog notes things without acting on them. Then she turned and went on.

Behind me, the sheet lay under its slate. I did not look back to see if it was still there. The place would do with it what it would do - take the date into the wet, let the colour leach into the ground over weeks, let the slate keep it until the slate shifted. The entry behind the date was not on the sheet and the place had no way to ask for it and would not have asked even if it could. Brackenmoss had been keeping things for longer than the ledger and would keep on keeping them.

The track ahead was unfinished in the way all tracks are unfinished: it became the next thing without announcement. The moss closed behind each step. Lano's white shape moved into the light ahead of me, just visible, just certain, the notebook in my coat still shut, still carried, its pages making no sound against the cloth.

---