Dream d3655-s: Chalk and Memory

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood in the lower passage of Kestrelfall, where the ceiling drops and the flagstones collect a fine white dust from the walls. Night had come in through the eastern gap but the light inside was still the afternoon's, a lamp someone had left burning on a shelf of cut stone.

A worker came through from the outer yard, a worn bag over one shoulder and her hands still dusted from whatever she had been doing outside. She set the bag down in the narrow space beside the wall.

I had been keeping a count of the marked timbers in the western row - nine, by my reading that morning. She looked at the row without being asked and said: seven.

Neither of us moved toward the timbers to recount them. She had come in from the yard, not from that direction, and she had said it simply, the way a person states a measurement they have already made. Seven. And I had nine, written on the folded paper in my pocket, from the morning light.

We stood there for a moment with both numbers between us. The lamp held steady. The dust on the flagstones caught its light and gave it back altered, and outside the yard was quiet.

She opened her bag and took out a length of cord. She did not explain her count and I did not explain mine. It was possible that two of the timbers I had marked had already been moved, or that two she had not marked had been added since her reading. Both of these could be true. Both could explain the gap without settling it.

I watched her measure the cord against the doorframe. Working hands, as I said - the kind that do not pause to explain themselves. The bag was old, the stitching along one handle replaced with a different thread, darker and tighter than the original.

Seven, she had said. Nine, I had written.

I left the paper in my pocket. The number was mine and hers was hers, and the timbers were somewhere in the dark of the western row and we were both of us in Kestrelfall at the third night of six, holding our separate readings the way you hold a tool you have not yet set down.

---