Dream d3662-s: What the Door Kept

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the bag had grown heavier by the second day out, or my shoulder had grown less patient with it. I shifted the strap and kept walking. The path ran downhill between hedgerows that had been trimmed recently and not yet gone ragged, and the light was the kind of flat grey that sits between afternoon and evening without committing to either.

The closed door of the approach house came into view before I expected it. Fourth return. I knew the door by its particular shade of ochre - a tone between rust and dried grass - and by the way the upper hinge threw its shadow differently depending on the hour.

I stopped a few feet out and set the bag down. The courtyard slate was wet from something: rain I had not walked through, or a bucket recently carried. The door held. There was no window at this face of the building; I had learned that early. Whatever work was being done inside - or not done, or done differently now - was sealed from the approach.

I waited the way you wait when you have come a long distance and the door has not yet registered that fact.

After a while I called out. The word for news felt too small in that courtyard - too compact for what I meant by it: whether the count had held, whether any of the unwitnessed places had been reached, whether the work had moved at all. The door gave nothing back. A rook crossed the sky above the roofline and was gone. The wet slate held the light differently where the grout had worn thin along the older courses.

The notebook was in the bag and stayed there. The eight sheets from before were in there too, stacked and sealed. I had no reason to open either.

Someone was working on the other side of that door. I believed this the way you believe a fire is burning behind a wall you cannot touch - by the specific quality of the silence, by the absence of any sound that would mean something had stopped. The work was its own thing. My standing at the door did not slow it or speed it or register as a fact requiring response.

I stood at the approach to Quillgreen and held the unanswered question and waited to see if the door would say anything at all.

It did not.

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