Dream d3602-s: The Cord with a Knot

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the saw had just gone quiet.

The quarry in flat afternoon light, its walls stepped back to hold pools of their own shadow. I stand where the rubble thins, close enough to see without stepping into the work. Two figures near the road's edge: the sawyer at the near wall with a timber already cut, and a cart hand waiting by the wheel with her hands loose at her sides.

The sawyer lifts the timber, a measured length, not long, the cut face pale and clean. One end carries a shallow groove scored across the grain, the kind that reads as a mark when you know to look for it. He does not look toward me. He carries the length to a flat stone at the road's edge and sets it down notched-end first, toward the wheel.

The cart hand steps forward once. She stands over the timber and looks at the groove. The angle of it. Where the saw left its trace. She reads what is there without reaching for it yet.

The sawyer straightens, puts a hand into his coat. He draws out a short length of cord with a single knot tied midway along it and lays this across the timber without a word. That is the whole of the record. Cord and groove and the grain of fresh-cut wood.

She crouches, both hands around the timber. She does not test its weight; she takes it. The cord she folds into her own coat pocket and the timber goes onto her shoulder in one slow movement, settled there like something expected.

The sawyer has already turned back toward his work. The stone around us holds the light flatly and the dust on both their sleeves is the same pale ochre.

I have not moved. The handoff needed no witness to complete it, and yet I was there, and both of them knew it, and neither found that remarkable.

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