They call this place haunted, and I have traveled thirty thousand light-years of absolutely nothing to reach the edge of it, so let me tell you what abundance I found packed inside these walls.
The house is stuffed. Every room is a violation of the odds. Air, everywhere, thick with molecules that shove against skin and carry things: the ghost of woodsmoke, old rain in the timbers, a bowl of fruit going soft on a table, dust turning slowly in a shaft of afternoon. Where I come from, a single molecule can drift ten thousand years before it meets a friend. Here they collide constantly. They cannot stop touching.
And the warmth. Radiators tick. Floorboards hold the day's heat. And bodies. There are bodies here, moving, each one a furnace radiating out into the dark, each one close enough to the next to feel the other's warmth arrive.
The humans call it haunted because, they say, they are not alone. A cold spot in the hallway. A presence on the stair. A sense of being watched. I have counted the presences in this house: two living, and a memory they keep insisting is a third. That is two more than exist in a cube of space a billion miles wide.
They stand in the kitchen, six inches apart, and one of them whispers that the house feels empty tonight, that something is missing, that they feel so alone in here.
Alone. I turn the word over. I am the loneliest thing that has ever been, and I have never once felt what they mean by it.
Emptiness I know. I am fluent in it. And this rattling, breathing, over-full little box of warmth and dust and two whole hearts within arm's reach is not it.
It is the jackpot.
They are standing inside the jackpot, afraid of the change in its pockets.