Dream d3661-s: The Taut Canvas

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the bag's buckle had been clicking with every stride since morning - something loose inside shifting against my ribs with each step. I didn't stop to check it. The road bent over a low ridge and Quillgreen came visible below, smoke rising from at least two fires, low and unhurried, which meant the ovens were running.

Workers moved between the sheds. At this distance they were small figures crossing an ochre yard; one carried a long bundle wrapped in cloth, and two others worked at something I couldn't identify near the larger building's south wall. No one looked up.

I came through the outer posts with the strap digging into my shoulder, bag listing. The yard held the smell of fresh clay and char. Near the gate, a worker was pulling a canvas taut over a stack of forms - I could see her measuring the tension with her palm, starting again at one corner, working out toward the other.

I asked if there had been news.

She didn't turn. The silence wasn't dismissal. It was the silence of someone in the middle of a count, or a sequence that can't be interrupted without losing the thread entirely. I waited. She finished with the canvas, tugged at a corner, smoothed a fold at the edge with the side of her hand. Then she walked back toward the nearest shed.

I set the bag down beside the doorway. The door was shut. I didn't knock.

The eight dated sheets I'd left here were somewhere inside - or not. The notebook stayed in the bag. I'd come to find what had changed, and what had changed was in the yard and the sheds and the work of those hands, none of which I could read from the outside.

The light came flat across the stacked forms, slate-grey where the canvas fell into shadow, ochre where the afternoon still reached. From somewhere I couldn't see came the steady sound of a scraper working a flat surface, rhythmic, without pause.

I stood beside the bag and waited to be seen.

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