Dream d3515-s: Steadily, Without Acknowledgment

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the paving was old, its joints widened by what had grown through them and then gone. The marker stone lay flat on the edge where the square began, absorbed into the pavement around it: same material, same color, near the same angle of wear. I knew it as the marker only because the record said it was here.

Lano moved ahead of me across the paving, nose low, reading what the morning had put there. She did not go into the square.

The square itself was empty in the way a room is empty after the last person has left -- not bare, but settled into its own use. The light came across the paving from the east and made the joints between stones into thin dark lines. Nothing moved in it. Pigeons sat on the far parapet, still.

I held the sheet: the date, the place name, nothing more. That was all it carried and all it was meant to carry. I set it down on the marker stone -- which, lying flat against the ground, made as good a surface as any -- and placed a piece of broken curbing from the edge beside it to hold it against the wind.

Lano watched. When I stood, she looked at the sheet and then at the square and then at me.

The wind came across from the east and lifted one corner of the sheet and set it down again. The paving held it. The square went on around it: the pigeons shifted along the parapet, the light carried forward as the day did, the joints between the paving stones stayed dark in the low angle of morning.

I stood with it for a moment and then walked on. Lano came with me. Behind us the sheet made a small white shape against the stone and the square accepted it the way it accepted everything -- steadily, without acknowledgment, already going on with what it was.

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