Dream d3568-s: The Unshifted Board

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the timber quay lay quiet in a light that came sideways off the canal, pale and watered-down, the kind of morning that doesn't announce itself. The planks were grey with age and damp from the night before, and one board along the outer edge had worked itself loose at one end, its nail head rusted to a brown that almost matched the wood.

A figure stood at the landward end of the quay. Not doing anything particular - checking a knot on a post, running a hand along a rope's length to feel for fraying. Small motions, unhurried. Then the figure turned and walked up the slope toward the lane, and kept walking, and didn't look back. I watched until the shape disappeared past the willows.

Lano sat beside me on the quay edge. She watched too, her ears up, nose moving with the breeze off the water. When the figure was gone she lowered her head and sniffed at the gap between two boards, then looked out at the canal again, patient.

Another figure was already at the far mooring ring - a boat hand, coiling a line, doing the work that boat hands do. No ceremony in it. The loose board shifted slightly underfoot and the figure stepped around it without stopping, the way a person steps around something they've known was there for a while. The coiling continued. A rope was hung on a peg. A fender was checked against the hull.

The slow canal carried a sound of water moving around the bow of a moored boat. The morning smelled of algae and rope and the faint metallic edge that comes off old iron fittings in damp air. I stood on the quay and let all of it settle.

Then a second boat came around the bend from the east, moving at the pace the canal demands. Someone at the tiller, someone at the bow with a rope ready. The boat drew alongside and lines were passed and looped. The loose board lay where it lay. Nothing shifted. The boat was in, and the quay held it, and Lano stood and shook herself once and then sat again.

The eight sheets were somewhere in a bag I wasn't carrying. The notebook was closed in a different room. There was nothing to record here, nothing to assign. The place continued because the work continued, and the work continued because someone was already doing it. I stood there while the boat hand walked the boards toward the lane, and the quay was quiet again with a boat on it, and the loose board lay where it had always lain, and the water moved the way water does.

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Artwork instructions

IMAGE PROMPT: pixel art a human figure at the timber quay on the slow canal, a loose edge board, The first keeper walks away; the next person stays long enough to see the place continue., muted slate and ochre, soft daylight, 8-bit style