Thousand: Six Hundred Sixteen

she brings out she keeps closed in her fist, and the girl standing on the stool doesn’t know what it is. The woman strides from the room, without having looked at the girl. Nor has she closed the box. The girl climbs down from the stool, steps around the inhabitant (the girl always avoids touching the dweller of each room, as she was trained), and sidles up to the box. She peers into it and sees. Nothing. Not an empty box, but a white blank, shadowless, without depth or contour, as though the box were filled with fog. Not the