low · dining room · last swept lent
where the table's apron meets the inside of the leg and the leg meets the rug, there is a corner the broom has never properly entered. a small brass button — coat-sized, eight-holed — lies on the warp of the rug. a date-stone from a winter plum sits beside it. someone wrote a name on the underside of the table-top in pencil. you have to lie down to read it.
this was the corner of letters dropped during long suppers. once a pair of shears, retrieved a year later. once a tooth, in a paper twist, posted on for safekeeping. the keeper assumes the button belongs to a coat hung up so long ago the coat is no longer hung.
the cat arrives here when the room is full and sits in the angle of the leg, watching ankles. a child reads in this corner with both knees up and the lamplight failing. the keeper finds a thimble here once and cannot remember whose hand it sized.
field-note: anything dropped at the table goes ninety-three times out of a hundred into this one corner. it has been counted.