Dream d3699-s: Before the Seventh Night

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I walked beside a worker at the edge of Slatewharf, the dock road that follows the water inward. It was late afternoon, the light gone flat against the slate faces of the warehouses, and the worker carried a bag worn to softness at the handles - leather rubbed pale where the grip found its groove over years of the same journey.

We did not speak much. The road here turns twice before it reaches the gate, and between the first turn and the second there is a low wall where someone had stacked four crates and left them. The worker paused at the crates, not reading them, just measuring them by eye - not for any task I could see, just the pause that comes at something out of place.

I kept my notebook in my coat. I had checked it that morning and I kept it there.

The second turn opens onto a wider yard. A pile of rope, a handcart sitting on one wheel, a trough with standing water gone a little green. Nothing had changed since I had last been here. The worker moved through the yard without stopping. The bag shifted on their shoulder - it made the particular sound of something settled, not scrambled. What was inside had been packed before the first morning of travel and had not been repacked since.

At the doorway to the inner shed the worker set the bag down. Not through the door yet, just at the threshold. They turned the bag upright and checked the buckles without opening them. The buckles were fine. I could see the worker knew they were fine before the fingers found them.

I watched from a few steps back. The dock road had brought us here together but it was not my bag.

A sound came from inside the shed - not a voice, a tool being set down on a wooden surface. A small clean knock. The worker picked up the bag again, adjusted it, and went through the doorway.

I stayed where I was. The shed swallowed the figure and the light inside was warm and ordinary. The slate of the outer wall held the last of the sun at an angle that made the stone look almost amber.

The dated sheets were where I had left them. I had nothing to explain.

---