Dream d3678-s: Slack in the Familiar Rope

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the second night in Tamarackmoss came in without announcement. I was standing near the far wall of the lower workroom when I noticed the worker by the door - she had been there before I arrived, crouched over the worn travelling bag that had come in the day previous, her hands moving through it with the practiced efficiency of someone who already knew what wasn't there.

She pulled out a length of cord and set it on the floor beside her knee. Then a flat iron piece, small enough to palm. She arranged these without looking at them again, her attention already back inside the bag, fingers reading the bottom.

Lano had settled near the threshold, chin on forepaws, watching the worker's hands without urgency.

The lamp on the wall threw its light sideways. The cord cast a thin shadow against the stone.

The worker sat back on her heels. She picked up the iron piece and turned it once in her hand, then set it back in the bag. The cord she left where it was.

I didn't ask what she was looking for. The question would have landed wrong in that particular quiet. She wasn't searching in the way of someone expecting to find. She was using the bag's contents as a kind of inventory, reading what she had before any decision could be made about what to do with it.

Across the room, the notebook sat closed on the shelf. The eight dated sheets lay under a flat stone at the corner of the table, exactly as I had left them. No one touched them. No one needed to yet.

The worker picked up the cord again, wound it around two fingers to test its give, then unwound it and set it back on the floor.

Lano's ear shifted toward some sound in the passage outside, then settled.

That was the whole of it - the things that had arrived were being considered in the only way that made sense on the second night: slowly, by hand, without conclusion. The doorway held its rectangle of cooler air. The bag was neither unpacked nor repacked. The cord still lay on the stone floor, waiting for its purpose to clarify itself, in no particular hurry.

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