Dream d3535-s: Room Made at the Ridge

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I smelled the chalk before I saw her - a fine pale dust carried upward on the morning air, the particular scent of fresh-cut slate. I was already on the roof when she climbed the last rung, a stack of slates balanced against her hip, her free hand taking the parapet without looking for it. The ridge ran between us like a spine, one side still bare timber, the other half-covered in grey courses.

She set the stack down without ceremony. The slates fanned slightly as they settled, each edge beveled the same way, cut for this pitch, this house. She did not introduce herself or ask about the one already lifted - the ridge piece I had loosened an hour before, its bed of mortar turned to powder along one edge. She looked at it the way a person looks at something that is simply next on the list.

We worked on our knees side by side, though that is not quite right - there was a gap of two hand-widths between us, a space that neither of us chose and neither of us closed. She bedded a flat course, pressed it once with the heel of her palm, moved on. I set the ridge piece back into its channel, tapped it true with the back of a trowel.

Below, the square lay still. No stalls, no voices, just the pale rectangle of cobbles and the long morning shadow of the clock tower crossing it. From up here the square looked like a stage with no players and no one waiting.

A pigeon, grey as the slates themselves, landed near the far gable and walked the apex with small, purposeful steps. It stopped once, cocked its head at the two of us, then continued as if satisfied.

She worked steadily. I worked steadily. The lifted slate was the last thing between us, the one that had been the problem, and now it was not. She did not look over when I finished bedding it. I did not look over when she set her final course. The chalk smell thinned as the morning warmed.

When she climbed back down I heard the ladder creak twice, then not at all. The roof held everything it had been given.

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