They tell each other it is not safe here, and yet I hold it as I hold everything: the sagging beams, the warped stairs, the chandelier that has hung crooked for a hundred years and never once come down without my say. I hold the dust as it drifts, and I set it gently on the floor.
I hold the cold air they feel on the back of the neck; even cold air has weight, and I am carrying it down, always down, toward me.
The humans come in a nervous cluster, leaning into one another, and I feel every place where their shoulders touch. They believe something is here that I cannot account for. They say the house is heavy with the dead. I checked. The dead weigh nothing. Whatever they think is walking the upstairs hall registers nothing on me at all, and still the humans bend, still they press flat against the wall as though something is pushing.
One of them will not go up the stairs. She stands at the bottom and says she cannot carry this, and I do not understand, because she is carrying almost nothing, only her own small frame, which I have held since she was born and will hold without complaint. Whatever she means by this is invisible to me, weightless, and yet it bows her more than any load I have ever measured.
So I do the only thing I know. I hold the floor she is standing on. I hold the rail her hand grips. I hold her, and the house, and the crooked chandelier, and the dead who weigh nothing, all of it, steady, the way I have every night no one thanked me for.
Let them fear what floats.
I am the thing that never lets go.