Dream d3667-s: The Fingernail Width

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where a worker crouches at the corner where the east wall meets the floor, running her thumb along a seam that doesn't sit flush. She doesn't call me over - I've come to stand beside her because the sound of her moving drew me: a slow scrape of nail against stone, then nothing.

She points at the junction. Where mortar should fill the gap there is shadow, a fingernail's width of it, consistent along the whole lower course. She says the plan showed this section as finished. I look where she looks. The shadow is there.

We stand for a while in the low light coming through the passage behind us. Neither of us touches the gap again. The travelling bag I'd left propped against the wall has shifted an inch or two from where I placed it - some settling, or I miscounted the paving slabs when I set it down. Small displacements accumulate in this part of Rowanbrook.

She straightens and describes what she saw when the wall was first checked: the mortar was set, the joint was flush. She speaks without urgency, neither defending the original reading nor abandoning it. I listen. The shadow is still there. Both of these things remain true in the room.

The light shifts as someone moves through the passage. For a moment the gap catches it differently and looks smaller, almost negligible. Then the light settles back and the shadow returns to its earlier width. We both see it. Neither of us says anything about what we just saw.

She pulls a strip of card from her coat and holds it to the gap without pressing. The card fits. She does not write on it. She holds it there for the count of three or four breaths, then tucks it back into her pocket and picks up the end of her own bag from where it rests near the base of the wall.

I take a different measurement of nothing: I look at the seam and try to fix its exact width in memory, knowing I will not be certain of it by morning. The wall has been here longer than the plan and longer than both of us.

We leave the east corner as we found it. In the passage the air is cooler than in the room, and the stone underfoot gives a different sound to our steps - a hollow note where the floor has not been fully bedded down. We hear it and neither of us marks it on anything. That is a separate account, still open.

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