Dream d3708-s: Stone Without a Name

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I sat at the far end of a long table in Dunnebarrow, sorting small stones by weight. Not by size - weight. The distinctions were slight and the work required both hands, one to hold and one to compare, and I had been at it long enough that my wrists had settled into the rhythm.

A woman at the other end of the table had not taken off her coat. Her traveling bag leaned against the table leg rather than sitting on the table, which I noticed. She began to describe a place she had been - not recently, she said, but some years before the paths changed. She spoke the way a person speaks when deciding, sentence by sentence, whether to continue.

Lano was under the table. I could hear her settling against the stone floor, her back pressing to my boot.

The woman said there had been a building on the north edge of the place she described, and that it had been used for accounting, or for storage - she was not certain which. Someone had told her one thing, and someone else had told her another, and the two tellings did not agree on what had been kept there, or whether the building was still standing when she had last passed through.

I kept sorting. A stone that seemed light would sometimes surprise the other hand.

She did not seem to need a reply. She was working something out through the telling of it, and the account did not resolve - it arrived at the point where she had stopped knowing. The building might have been torn down. Or it might have become something else entirely.

Outside, the yard was still. The daylight through the open doorway had the flat quality of a covered sky, no shadow to read a direction from.

Lano's nose appeared briefly above the table edge, then withdrew.

I set one stone in the left pile and held the next between my palms longer than necessary, feeling where its weight settled. The woman retied the top of her bag, though she had not opened it.

The question she had raised - what the building had been for - stayed in the room after she went quiet. Neither of us reached toward an answer. Some accounts are worth carrying not because they resolve but because they are still in motion.

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Artwork instructions

IMAGE: pixel art a human worker framed by an open doorway in Dunnebarrow, listening, working hands and a worn travelling bag, muted slate and ochre, soft daylight, 8-bit style