Dream d3690-s: Still in the Wrapping

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where a worker stood in a doorway at Emberbridge and did not call out my arrival. She had her back to the street, sorting lengths of cord by feel in the soft daylight, each one coiled against her thigh before being set down on the sill in a separate pile.

The travelling bag sat open on the floor behind her. Not unpacked - the flap back, the mouth showing, the top items still wrapped in cloth as they had been placed. She hadn't gotten to them yet, or she had decided not to. I couldn't tell which.

I stood to one side of the threshold and watched. She worked through the cord without hurry, her fingers reading each length for fraying, discarding two into a smaller pile at the edge of the sill. The light came in at a low angle and picked out the wear on her jacket's collar, the scuff along the bag's outer seam. The room behind her was as I had found it on earlier visits - the table, the shelves, the same arrangement of bowls on the second shelf from the top. Nothing had moved.

A pigeon landed on the roof tile above the doorframe and settled its weight with one small shuffle. The worker didn't look up.

The bag stood where it had been set down - upright, not leaning. Something inside it was dense enough to keep it plumb. She reached in once, drew out a small wrapped packet, held it briefly at arm's length as though judging its weight against some remembered standard, and set it on the sill beside the cord. She did not unwrap it. She went back to the cord.

I counted six piles on the sill without meaning to and then stopped counting. The work was not for counting. It was for something else - the kind of task that comes before the task that can actually begin, the clearing of a surface so that another surface is ready.

She did not speak and I did not either. The bag stood plumb. The light moved a small distance across the floor and the room stayed quiet around it.

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