Dream d3646-s: The Generator Quiet

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the gravel shifted underfoot and told me I was close before I saw the roofline. That particular crunch - loose, then firmer where someone had packed it through the wet weeks - was the approach to Ospreygreen. I did not need to look up.

The gate was closed. Not locked - the latch was only resting in its cradle, not dropped through - but shut, which was different from how I had left it. A worker moved in the yard beyond, carrying something I could not identify at this distance, not pausing to look toward the road.

Lano had gone still at my left heel. Her ears were flat against her skull - not the soft folding of tiredness, but the pressed-back alertness of something read in the air. One short bark, not addressed at the closed gate or the moving worker, but aimed at a middle distance, at some thing I had not yet placed. Then silence.

I shifted the bag on my shoulder. Most of what I had carried was already accounted for, left at the intermediary stops. What remained was the notebook I was not opening and the eight sheets I was not touching. I had come back to ask, not to deliver.

A second worker appeared at the far corner of the low building that housed the generator. She was carrying a length of tubing, holding it away from her body as if it were still warm. She said something to the first worker, who set down what he had been carrying and followed her around the corner.

The generator was quiet. I noticed it the way you notice silence after a sound you have been ignoring - the absence had a shape. The settlement's lights were not lit, it was still daylight, the afternoon giving a soft ochre to the slate walls, but I had been here when the generator filled the yard with its low frequency and this was not that. Against the outer wall of the supply lean-to, a cleared rectangle in the dust marked where a stack of crates had stood, moved or emptied and not replaced. The workers had not returned from the corner.

Lano pressed against my calf. Her tail was still.

I put my hand on the gate latch. The thing I had come to ask had not been asked, and the gate had not opened, and the workers had gone around the corner and not come back. The road had carried me to the edge of what it could tell me. The rest of it was through the door.

I stood at the threshold and waited.

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