Dream d3711-s: The Folded Response

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road through Dunnebarrow ran between low walls, the stone dark with morning damp and the grass between the paving stones still holding color from last night's rain. I carried the bag against my left shoulder, the strap worn to a softness that no longer marked the skin. Inside it, the response - not opened again, not checked, just carried as a thing that had been given and now needed to arrive somewhere it hadn't been yet.

A worker at the first threshold I passed was turning a piece of board in her hands, running her thumb along the grain without looking at it. She glanced up when I came through the gate, then looked back at the wood. Neither of us said anything. The bag's weight shifted and I steadied it with my elbow.

The town was as I had left it. Two people at the far end of the street were working the same corner they had occupied on the outward journey - the stones there still half-lifted, the gap still open. They had not covered it. They had not uncovered more. Whatever work belonged to that patch of road was proceeding at its own rate, unaware of what I carried.

Lano kept a few paces behind, her nails clicking on the dry stones where the mud had dried. She didn't press forward. The town did not ask her to hurry and she did not hurry. Once she stopped completely - nose down toward a joint between paving stones - and I went on a dozen yards before she trotted to catch up, her white coat still carrying a long smear of road dust from the previous night.

At the place where I had sat to write down the first account - the low bench near the storehouse wall - I did not sit. I looked at the bench and walked past. The sheets were elsewhere, where they should be. The response I carried did not require them. The first account was its own thing now, fixed where I had left it, and what I carried was a separate weight, not added to it.

The storehouse doors stood open. A man was rolling a barrel across the threshold, both hands gripping the iron bands, the barrel's bottom edge scoring a line in the dust as it went. He had been doing this long enough that there was already a track worn into the threshold stone. He would finish this barrel and go back for another. The account of that work would take care of itself.

I walked through the center of the square and out the far end. The bag felt the same at the end of the town as at the beginning. Nothing had opened. Nothing had been added. The response stayed folded, intact, waiting for where it was going.

---