Inventory of a Sublet

The faucet still keeps a stranger's rhythm, two turns toward warm before it relents. I learn the house the way you learn a language— by the small failures of its grammar.

A nail with no picture. A burn ring on the sill where someone set a mug down, watching what? The window frames a chimney and the slow arithmetic of pigeons working the ledge.

In the back of a drawer, a single hairpin, the heel of a candle, a receipt gone soft as a leaf. Evidence of a life that learned this latch, this draft, this light.

At night the radiator clears its throat and tells me nothing. I lie in borrowed warmth and feel the room remember other sleepers, the way a glass holds, faintly, the last wine.

Come autumn I will leave my own small ruins— a thumbtack, a water stain, a key returned to a palm I never shook— and the house will keep its rhythm, and forget.