Dream d3643-s: The Bag Against the Stone

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came back along the lower path at a time when the light sat flat and grey across the slope, not morning and not evening, the kind of hour that refuses to name itself.

The bag weighed more than when I had left. I had noticed this since the junction - something in the distribution of the load, some settling in the straps, the way it pulled one shoulder lower. I had not opened it to look. I kept walking.

Ospreygreen announced itself first as a shadow in the hillside, a shape that was not the hill. Then the wall. Then the door in the wall: closed, the wood pale at the edges where hands had passed over it many times, the iron latch weathered to the same dull slate as the stone around it.

I stopped.

There was no smoke from the upper outlet. No sound from the courtyard. A worker had been here - I could see where the ground had been raked recently, the ochre earth patterned in parallel lines that the wind had begun to erase at the edges. The work was recent and it was finished and whoever had done it was not visible.

I set the bag down against the wall beside the door. The strap had worn a pale arc into the fabric at the point of the buckle. I had not noticed that either, though it must have been forming for some time.

I knocked.

The sound of the knock was ordinary. Wood, knuckle, the brief muffled report of it. After that: nothing. Not the silence of an empty place - a held silence, one with weight to it, the kind that happens when work is continuing somewhere beyond the range of what I could see or hear.

I waited.

The raked lines in the ochre earth. The door pale at the edges. The worn arc on the strap.

I had questions about what had changed here, what the pattern of those lines meant against what I remembered, whether the outlet had been moved or whether I was misremembering the position. The door did not answer.

I put my hand flat against the wood. The grain rose under my fingers, the surface cool and rough where the weather had worked it over a long time. Whatever was happening inside was happening. Whatever had been found was still being found, or was already set aside, or had moved into some other stage I had no way to name from here.

I stood beside the closed door with my hand on the wood and did not know.

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