Dream d3514-s: One Road Comes In

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road came in under my feet and the paving started there, at that edge, and ran perhaps eighty steps before it ran out again into the same bare ground it had come from. Dunnesquare opened around it, flat and wide, the corners of nothing pushed back by the amber light of a single lamp at the square's center that nobody had yet thought to extinguish. The ground at the margins was packed and pale, neither dust nor mud, the kind of earth that takes an impression slowly and gives it back slowly.

Lano walked ahead of me, her small white shape moving between the lamp's reach and the dark beyond, nose low, not urgent but deliberate.

A keeper of the place stood at the far side of the paving where it gave out again into bare ground, not watching the road but watching the corner where the two emptinesses met. She wore a coat the color of the umber earth and she did not turn when I crossed the threshold.

I took the sheet from the ledger, one sheet, a date and a place, nothing of the entry behind it, and I set it on the paving at the edge where the road came in. There was no weight to hold it. I found a flat piece of the broken edge itself, a flake of old cement, and laid it across one corner. The sheet settled.

Lano circled back and sniffed the paper once, then sat beside it and looked at the lamp.

The keeper of the place crossed the square without speaking. When she reached the sheet she did not bend to read it. She looked at it the way she had looked at the corner, as one thing among the things the place had accumulated. Then she moved on, and her footsteps on the paving made the only sound, until they didn't.

The lamp put its amber circle down on the ground and the ground held it. The sheet was part of that now, the pale rectangle between the paving and the empty ground, and the place went on the way places go on when nothing new has been asked of them.

I walked out the other side, into the bare margin. Behind me the sheet was still there. The date on it was correct. The place it named was this one.

Lano came after me, unhurried, and her claws made small taps on the paving's last few squares before she stepped off into the ground.

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