Dream d3550-s: After the Keeper Turns

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the path through the reed beds appeared in early light, the plank across the first gap washed pale and slightly askew, its grain raised by many crossings. I stood at the edge where the ground firms up, and I watched.

A figure walked away from the far end of the path, not hurrying. The reeds had given them a particular posture: head down, steps placed carefully, the way anyone learns after many mornings of the same route. They did not look back. The light came sideways through the stems and made their shadow long, and then the shadow shortened and bent against the drier ground beyond, and then it was gone with them.

For a moment the path held nothing.

Then from the left bank, where the stems grow tallest and the water is shallower, a second figure moved into the entrance of the path. This one carried a handled tool across one shoulder and paused at the plank without pausing long, stepping onto it with a foot that knew the wood's slight give. The board flexed and steadied. They crossed to the island of dry ground at the middle, checked the base of something I could not see from where I stood, and moved on toward the eastern edge of the beds.

Their feet never broke a stem. The reeds parted and came back. I could track their passage only by the soft sound of that parting, a sound like a slow exhale repeated.

The eight sheets I had left in the notebook pocket were still there, folded against each other. I did not take them out. Whatever counted as a record of this place was not in my hands.

Water ran under the plank at a low angle, carrying a slip of reed chaff downstream. A moorhen worked the far margin without hurry. The plank settled back to flat.

The figure with the tool emerged from the reeds at the far end and kept walking, already onto the harder ground, already not looking back any more than the first one had. The path sat empty again, but a different empty than before: it had been used. The boards had been pressed by two sets of feet in less than a quarter hour, and neither set had been mine.

I stood on the firm ground and watched the reeds resume their ordinary height, stem by stem, as the last disturbance moved through them and was gone.

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