Dream d3683-s: Low Lamp at the Threshold

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the step up to the receiving place was the same as I left it: worn at the center, dry at the edges where the overhang kept rain off. A worker was pulling a shutter closed on the far side of the building, and the sound - wood against wood, then the click of a catch - carried clearly through the dark.

I set my bag down in the entryway. The eight dated sheets were where I had left them, fanned slightly at one corner as if a draft had found them. I did not touch them.

The cold had settled since morning - the kind that gathers in stone buildings when no fire has run. A single lamp hung from a hook near the door, its wick turned low, casting light only as far as the threshold stone.

Lano had come in ahead of me. She was standing near the lamp, nose angled toward the dark interior, ears forward. After a moment she exhaled - a slow dog-breath, the kind that means nothing threatening - and moved to the wall to settle.

A second worker appeared from a back passage, carrying a folded cloth over one arm. She crossed the room without speaking, set the cloth on a shelf near the far window, and went back the way she had come. The cloth was the color of old linen, nearly grey in the low light. The shelf held two other folded things just like it.

I sat on the bench near the door. The bag lay beside me on the floor. I had not opened it yet. There was no urgency in the room, no one waiting on what I carried. The building was receiving me the way it receives everything: without hurry, without acknowledgment, in the way of a place that has always known the work comes back.

Outside, something moved once through the gravel - a single soft step - and was still. Lano's ear flicked but she did not rise.

The lamp held.

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