Dream d3697-s: The Lip of the Sill

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the building at Slatewharf carried no sound except the settling kind - the deep contraction that old stone makes after dusk. I came in through the channel-facing entrance and found a worker standing just inside the threshold, a worn travelling bag propped against the jamb beside her. She had the look of someone who had been waiting without impatience.

She pointed to the sill: the lower horizontal stone where the door frame meets the floor. Her account was clear and without complaint. The sill was meant to align with the interior boards, flush enough that the seam between them would be nominal - the kind of line you'd cross without noticing. That had been the expectation, she said.

Then she tapped a knuckle against the stone where it actually sat. The boards around it showed a visible lip - perhaps the depth of a thumbnail, perhaps a little more. Not structural. Not dangerous. But different from what was intended.

I crouched and looked. Both things were true: the plan had called for flush, and the result was not.

She didn't tell me why. She offered two possibilities - the boards had been laid thicker than the cut accounted for, or the sill had been placed first and the boards came in short. Neither could be confirmed without pulling something up, and neither of us moved to do that.

Lano had followed me inside. She sniffed along the base of the jamb, then settled on her haunches near the travelling bag and watched us, ears forward.

We stood at the threshold for a moment, both looking at the same thing and neither resolving it. She had shown me the difference. I had seen it. The two accounts stayed on either side of the explanation, each intact, neither discarding the other.

Outside, the channel was low and the night was quiet in the particular way of a place that has finished its day's measure without ceremony. The notebook stayed in my coat. The worker didn't ask what I would record. I left the bag where it was and the stone where it was and the lip between them exactly as wide as it had been when I walked in.

---