narrow · upper floor · last swept michaelmas
where the balustrade ends in its newel and the wall takes over, the boards run out into a wedge no one quite stands in. a stiff-backed chair sits there, three feet from the stair-head, with a folded blanket whose folds have never come unfolded. above it, in the cornice, a small hook from which nothing hangs.
a lamp on a long flex used to live here, plugged into a socket made for something else. before that, a small drawer-table for the brass tray of letters going down. the drawer slid, eventually, into the wall, and was painted over.
the cat sits on the chair when the sun comes through the round window at the back of the stairwell. the keeper pauses here on the way up — never on the way down — and finds, for the length of one breath, that they have forgotten the errand.
field-note: the third floorboard from the wall, going east, sings a half-tone when it remembers to.