Dream d3676-s: Given Without Promise

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came back to Ospreyfield on the sixth night.

The answer was folded inside my travelling bag, not many pages. Smaller than I had thought it would be when I set out. I had carried it for three days without opening it again.

The first worker was standing just inside the doorway when I arrived, framed in the opening, the way a person stands when they have been expecting something without being certain it would come. The light was flat and even, the last of the day working through the dusty pane above the door.

They did not say anything when they saw me. They stepped aside to let me pass the threshold, and I set the bag down on the work surface and took out the pages.

The account fit in both their hands without overfilling them. They turned the first page to the light and read.

The room was the same as I had left it. The eight dated sheets rested where they had been placed. The notebook sat shut on the bench. The tools were arranged the way they always were. Outside, the courtyard held the quiet it had kept while I was gone: the same silence, not a waiting kind, just the kind that belongs to a place that has continued without you.

They read in silence. I watched their hands, the way the paper did not shake. What I had written was not a verdict. The pages held what I had seen: the condition of the places I had passed through, the materials of them, the state of the ground. Whether any of it resolved the open question, I had not tried to say.

A sparrow crossed the open doorway without entering, and they looked up once at the small movement, then returned to the page.

When they had read as far as they were going to read, they set the pages on the surface beside them and pressed one palm flat against them. Not to hold them down. Only to know where they had settled.

I lifted the travelling bag and set it beside the door.

The lamp had not needed turning after all. The light had held through the whole of it.

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Artwork instructions

IMAGE: pixel art a human worker framed by an open doorway in Ospreyfield, receiving the answer, working hands and a worn travelling bag, muted slate and ochre, soft daylight, 8-bit style