Dream d3544-s: The Rope Still Warm

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the road fork just as the light thinned to something cool and even, the kind of morning that belongs to no particular hour.

The well sat at the center of the fork, stones worn smooth along the coping where hands had rested for longer than anyone living could say. A rope threaded through a wooden sleeve, the wood dark with lanolin from years of passing palms. I had come with no particular purpose, only that I was thirsty and the road split here and I had stopped.

There was a figure ahead of me on the road, walking away from the fork. I did not watch them go. I watched the well.

A neighbor arrived from the other branch of the road, a bucket in one hand, unhurried. She set the bucket on the coping and reached for the rope. It ran through the sleeve without catching, the knot traveling down clean, the bucket dropping into the dark below with a sound like a struck bell. When the rope came back up, the bucket came with it, full, the motion so practiced it seemed the well itself was doing the lifting.

No stone was rubbed further. The sleeve had long since taken the shape of ten thousand such passages, and this one fit inside that shape without adding to it or taking from it. There was a low creak from the post as the weight settled, and then quiet.

The neighbor poured half the bucket into a trough at the base of the fork post and carried the rest with her toward the lower road. She did not look back. She had not looked at me either. The well simply sat at the fork, unchanged by the morning's transaction.

I rested my hand on the coping for a moment. The stone was neither warm nor cold, only present. The rope hung straight in the still air. Somewhere up the road there was a sound of footsteps going, and then there was not.

The well did not require anything of me. I stayed a little longer than I needed to, watching the rope settle. Then I walked on.

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