Dream d3686-s: The Stone She Left

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the bench ran the length of the far wall, and I worked at one end of it while a second worker occupied the other, each of us sorting through what we had collected without looking up. The light came in low through the doorway - soft, the color of unglazed clay - and it fell across the worn leather of my bag where it sat open on the floor.

I had been going through what I'd gathered: a few folded slips, a tally I'd made by notching a piece of scrap wood, the stub of a pencil too short now to be useful. The answer I was packing wasn't large. Nothing at this end of Quillhush had shifted since the last time through. The same walls stood. The same tools hung in the same order on their pegs. The few workers I'd spoken to had given me the same report in different words - quiet, steady, no complaints, no requests.

That was a kind of answer. I folded the notched wood in with the slips and drew the bag's flap down.

The other worker glanced over. She was older, her hands quick and certain with the buckles of her own pack, and she didn't ask what I'd found. Without explanation she set a small stone on the bench between us - smooth, flat, the color of slate - and left it there.

I looked at it for a moment. Then I picked it up and put it in my bag with the rest. If it had meant something specific to her, she'd have said. Maybe it was a stone she'd been carrying and no longer needed. Maybe it was the kind of thing you hand off when you want someone to know you were there and found it quiet, too.

I stood and slung the bag over one shoulder. The doorway held the pale morning outside - a strip of ochre at the horizon where the light was thickest, and above it the dull gray of cloud not yet committed to anything.

The second worker finished her buckles and moved past me without a word, out through the door and away up the lane. I waited long enough to be certain I had left nothing on the bench.

Nothing. The bench was clean.

I followed her out.

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