Dream d3669-s: The Road Knows the Weight

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road into Rowanbrook narrowed between two stone walls, and I walked it in the afternoon light beside a worker I did not know by name. She carried a bag with a canvas strap worn pale where her hand had gripped it, the clasp at the top rubbing copper against copper every few steps. The sound kept time.

We had come from somewhere lower, where the ground stayed wet longer and the hay hadn't dried properly - she had told me this early in the walk, matter-of-factly, and hadn't said much since. I had my notebook in my coat pocket, its spine pressing against my ribs, and I kept it there. Whatever she was working through, she was working through it herself.

The walls opened at a gate and a third person was waiting, leaning against the post with his arms crossed. He and the woman exchanged something - a look, then a word about the timing of the second batch - and I stood to the side. There was a stack of flat boards against the wall, rough-cut, held by a single cord. The third person untied it and counted three boards without looking up.

Lano had been ahead of us most of the walk, trotting in and out of the verge. Now she came back and pressed close to the woman's ankle, nose down, reading the mud on her boots. The woman didn't acknowledge her but shifted her bag to her other shoulder, which made room.

The boards got tied back without the three. The third person carried them toward the open door of a low building - not the one I had been in before, I didn't think, but similar in the way its roof met the wall unevenly. Light inside was yellow and still, and I could see the edge of a table.

The woman set her bag down outside the door. She didn't go in. She stood with her hands free for the first time since we had left the lower field, and she looked at the bag on the ground, then at the door, then at her hands.

I did not open the notebook. I did not tell her what I would have written. The light was going soft and flat, the kind that makes everything the same distance, and the copper clasp on the bag had gone quiet.

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