Dream d3727-s: The Margin Between Two Tallies

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we were in a room with low ceilings in Rowanbrook, and I had spread my pages on the table while the other worker - a broad-shouldered man whose coat was still damp at the collar from the road - laid his beside mine.

We had both visited the hill above the eastern quarter. My record showed the wall on the left side as cracked from the foundation up, a gap wide enough to wedge two fingers. His showed the same wall as sound, recently pointed with new mortar. We looked at both pages for a while without speaking.

I said: maybe mine is older.

He said: mine is from last Tuesday.

We left both records where they were. Neither of us crossed anything out.

Lano had come in from outside and was nosing along the baseboard, her white coat gone grey at the paws from the road. She settled near the window without being told and watched the light shift across the floorboards.

His bag was on the chair beside him - a worn leather satchel with brass clips, the kind that had been somewhere for years before it came to him. Inside I could see bundled papers, a folded cloth, a small flat stone that must have come from a path somewhere. He didn't explain the stone and I didn't ask.

We worked through eleven more places without disagreement. On the twelfth he had a note I hadn't made: a water sound below the floor of a storage building, audible when the street outside went quiet. I had been there in the middle of the day with carts passing. I wrote it into my margin.

On the sixteenth I had noted a door that opened only partway and required a shoulder. He had gone through it freely, and said so. We looked at each other.

The afternoon light had moved a full hand's width across the floor by then. Lano stood, stretched in the way she had, and trotted to the door to indicate she wanted out. I let her go and came back to the table.

We folded our pages separately at the end. The wall record stayed contradictory. The water sound stayed on my margin. The door that required a shoulder remained in my notes and not in his. Neither version was struck. We went out into the street together and the cobblestones were still wet from rain that had ended an hour before.

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