Dream d3657-s: Lamp in the Passage

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I walked behind a worker coming back into Kestrelfall as the last daylight thinned to a line along the rooftops. She carried a bag worn soft at the corners, the strap having cut its own groove into the leather over her shoulder. I did not speak. The notebook stayed in my coat.

The settlement was quiet at that hour. A trough had been refilled and the water lay still. Someone had left a lamp burning in one of the lower windows - not for us, or not only for us, but its light reached the lane and showed the cobblework slick from the day's earlier rain.

The worker paused once on the approach, not from hesitation but from the weight of what she carried. She shifted the strap, settled it, and walked on. Her boots left a scuffed line in the mud at the lane's edge. I followed a pace behind, watching the bag swing slightly with her step - a rhythm she had found somewhere on the road and not yet set down.

She stopped at the threshold of a low building and put the bag on the ground without opening it. Her hands went free. She stood for a moment looking at the dark window across the lane, then at the lamp window again. Her palms, when she turned them, were reddened from the strap.

There were eight sheets of paper on the table inside - I knew without looking - still where I had left them, dates upward in the corners. I did not go in. Whatever she was arriving at was not a question I could answer for her.

She lifted the bag again, moved it flush against the wall. A small adjustment, the kind a person makes when they have been away long enough that a familiar place requires repositioning. Her hand rested briefly on the wall's surface before she straightened.

The lamp held. The trough did not move. The lane behind us was empty.

I kept the notebook shut.

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