Dream d3599-s: The Step Not Yet Set

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the chalk road ended at the cut, where the quarry face opened in a pale shelf of stone. The light was soft and even, the kind that comes before the sun climbs high enough to cast useful shadows. I had walked the length of the approach and arrived at the steps carved into the face, and I saw before anything else that the third step from the bottom was absent.

Not broken - absent. The space was clean and level, as though the step had never been set or had been lifted away in one piece, leaving a gap too wide for a short stride and too deliberate to be accident. Chalk dust lay undisturbed in the groove where the riser should have met the wall.

I stood at the base and looked up through the gap. The upper steps were intact, leading to the flat shelf where the timber stores were kept. Someone coming down from there carrying weight would step into nothing.

Lano had come with me to the foot of the cut. She sat beside my boot and looked up at the missing step, her ears forward, her nose working once and then stilling. She did not move toward the gap. She simply sat.

The sound of wood dragging on chalk reached me before I saw the carrier - a figure descending the side path, moving along the base of the quarry face with a length of timber balanced across one shoulder. There was a mark on it, a stripe of dark paint close to one end, the kind of mark a person makes when the piece has already been measured and confirmed.

The carrier had not yet reached the steps. He was still on the lower path, adjusting his grip where the timber shifted against his shoulder. I saw the gap. I saw the timber. I did not speak.

Lano pressed briefly against my leg, then sat again.

The carrier came to the foot of the steps and set the near end of the timber down against the chalk and looked up at the third place from the bottom - the clean groove, the undisturbed dust. He stood still for a moment. Then he lifted the timber and turned it upright in the space, testing the length.

I kept my hand flat on the cool face of the stone and watched him work. The timber fit.

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