Dream d3673-s: Taller Than the Drawing

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where a worker stood in the doorway of a low building near the eastern edge of Ospreyfield, her travelling bag propped against the stone at her feet. She had arrived before me and did not look up when I reached the path that led to her.

In one hand she held a folded sheet - a working sketch, faintly creased at its corners. She held it flat at arm's length and looked from the paper to the lintel above her, then back again. The drawing had the door opening at a certain height. The actual opening was taller. Not by much: a hand's width, perhaps two fingers more. But the difference was there, plain and still.

She did not mark the paper. She did not reach for anything to measure with. She held both accounts - the sketch and the stone - without pushing one toward the other.

I moved alongside her and she tipped the sheet so I could see: the line on the paper, the actual threshold above us. The gap between them was not an error and she did not treat it as one. It was simply what the place had become since the drawing was made, or what the drawing had always left out, or something in between. She gave me no explanation. I did not ask for one.

The building was cold. The walls were slate-grey from the night's damp, not yet dried. Light through the doorway came from behind a low ceiling of cloud, flat and without shadow, and the stone of the threshold caught none of it.

She folded the sketch back along its lines and slid it into the outer pocket of her bag. The bag settled as she lifted it by the strap. She looked at the lintel once more, the way you check a thing you already know is true, and then she stepped through.

I stayed in the open frame after she had gone. The lintel where it was. The drawing folded away, its distance intact.

---