Dream d3565-s: Slack Water, Strange Pulse

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the timber quay stretched out over the slow canal and the evening light lay flat on the water, neither gold nor grey but something between them. The edge board near the south post had come loose again, one end lifting half a finger's width from the stringer below. I stood beside it, not yet deciding what to do with my hands.

The boat hand came along the dock with a coiled rope over one shoulder and a small mallet hooked to a loop at their hip. They stepped around the loose board without looking down at it, the way someone steps around a familiar crack in a familiar floor, and set the rope coil on a bollard. Neither of us spoke. There was room enough for two people beside the board, and we took it.

Lano had been sitting near the post, watching the water. She lifted her head when the boat hand arrived, tail moving once, and then she went still. Her ears came forward, then laid flat. Not at the boat hand - at something further out, some direction I could not find by looking.

The mallet came down once on a nail that had risen with the damp. The board settled.

Then the sound from the receiving shed at the top of the slope. A tone, short and even, not the interval of any beacon I had memorized. Then again. The boat hand looked up. I looked up. Lano gave one sharp bark, high and clipped, and pressed low against the planking.

One of the watchers from inside the shed appeared at the doorway with a clipboard but not writing on it. They held it at their side and looked at us, then back into the shed, then at us again. Their face carried the careful expression of a person assembling the meaning of something they have never assembled before.

The tone came a third time. No pattern I recognized. No origin I could point to on any chart stored in the shed. The slow canal continued its motion without comment. The rope coil sat on the bollard. The board was held.

Lano did not move from her crouch. Her nose worked the air above the water, and I watched her track something I could not see, her whole body a question she had no word for.

Nobody reached for the notebook. Nobody counted. We stayed at the edge of the quay and let the sound arrive again, and this time it arrived changed - not louder, not softer, but different in its interior, the way a door sounds different when there is something behind it.

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