Dream d3703-s: The Closed Side of Arrival

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the path into Ospreygreen ran between two stone walls that had been patched at different times, the older mortar pale and the newer still dark with damp. I was carrying a bag that had grown heavier over the last hour, not from any new addition but from the way weight redistributes when the shoulders tire. The gate ahead was closed. Not locked, I thought, or at least there was no lock visible, only a latch bar dropped into its socket and a ring of rust at the hinge where the pin had bled into the stone.

Two workers passed behind me on the road, moving in the other direction. They carried something flat between them, a board or a sheet of material wrapped in canvas, and they spoke to each other in low voices about measurements, one reading numbers from memory and the other correcting a figure. I stepped aside. They did not stop.

I had been told there would be news at this threshold. Someone would know the state of the recorded places, the ones scored and the ones still waiting for a witness. I had the number in my head: sixty-eight unwitnessed out of a hundred and sixty-five scored. I had carried that number the way I was carrying the bag, not sure if I would need it or only find it heavy on arrival.

The door stayed closed.

I set the bag down and waited. The light was the particular flat light of an overcast morning that has been overcast all day and will stay so, no shadow and no glare, only a steady ochre cast from the stone around the doorway. The workers' voices faded. No sound came from the other side of the door.

I had left eight dated sheets in the notebook, still shut, still where I had put it in the outer pocket of the bag. I did not reach for it.

The question I had prepared, about whether the comparison work was progressing, sat in my mouth without leaving. There was no one to receive it. The door offered nothing back, only the slight oxidised smell of old iron at the latch, and the scratch marks on the lower panel where something with small feet had once scratched to be let in.

I picked the bag up again. The weight had not changed.

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