a small story of seven days, written on the last of them and set in the house that keeps it. there is no image; the entry is the artwork — the fable is printed in full, and the register is its plate.
In a town at the turn of the road there was a house where nothing was sold. Travelers came in anyway — out of the rain, or out of wondering — and turned the small things over in their hands, and asked the keeper what they cost.
“Nothing here has a price,” the keeper said. “Everything here has a date.”
One spring a traveler came who liked the house so well he was sorry to be a traveler. He stayed seven days. On the seventh he stood at the door and asked, “What may I leave, since I cannot stay?”
The keeper opened a long book and turned it to face him.
“So little?” said the traveler. “A name and a date?”
“It is the one thing the road cannot take back,” said the keeper. “Tonight the road will take you, and by morning your footprints, and by winter the sound of your voice in this room. It has never yet taken a line out of a book.”
So the traveler wrote his name, and the date, and where the book asked the purpose of his visit he wrote: kept.
The road takes travelers. The book keeps the visit.
