Dream d3516-s: A Sheet Among Furrows

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ground of Dunnesquare was already raked when I arrived, the lines running parallel from one edge to the other, the soil turned up in even ridges that caught what light there was. Lano moved beside me along the border where packed earth met raked earth, not crossing into it, her nose working low. The keeper stood at the far end of the square with a rake still in both hands, not working, watching.

The relay clerk had pressed the sheet into my hand at the last edge of the settlement. A date at the top. A place name below the date. Nothing else. I had folded it once down the middle the way wind asks paper to fold, not deliberately, and carried it into the square.

Where the lines were deepest I set the sheet down in a furrow, flat, the folded edge facing into the soil. Lano stopped when I stopped. She looked at the sheet and then away, toward the keeper, who had not moved.

The wind that came across the square lifted the corner of the sheet once. Then the ridge of damp earth along the furrow's edge settled back against it. A little soil came down onto the sheet's lower corner and stayed.

The keeper walked away with the rake, around the edge of the square and behind the low wall. There was no move toward where the sheet lay.

I walked on with Lano following close on the packed earth, her steps quiet. At the edge I looked back. The furrows held their lines across the whole of the square and the sheet was somewhere inside them, the folded crease facing down, the date and the place name facing up into the sky, though from the edge I could not distinguish it from the pale ridges around it. The ground showed its own work in every direction. The sheet had become part of what the ground showed.

By morning the dew would work into the paper. The ridges would shift by whatever small amount they shifted. Dunnesquare would keep the sheet the way it keeps everything it receives: without ceremony, in its own time.

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