Your words.
A little haunted.

At midnight, the house was quiet enough to hear the refrigerator in the next room.

A book lay open on the table. I had left a sentence unfinished, and for a moment I could not remember which word belonged at the end. Then the first letter lifted from the page.

It rose slowly, as if the ink had become lighter than the air. Another followed. Small spaces opened inside familiar words. The lines stayed perfectly still. Above them, the letters turned and gathered into something with two dark eyes and an uneven hem.

I moved my hand closer. The little shape leaned away, losing a few letters around its edges. They hurried after it like children catching the last train. It seemed much more frightened of me than I was of it. I decided to leave the book open a little longer.

For a while it drifted between the paragraphs. When it disappeared beneath a line, the words shivered in place. I could follow its path through the story, a small disturbance moving under the surface. At the end of the sentence it came up for air.

When I finally touched it, the eyes grew wide. A sound like a sigh passed through the room. Every borrowed letter scattered, paused, and curved back toward the book. The long words filled first. A stubborn little letter took the scenic route home.

The sentence was whole again. I read it twice to make sure nothing had changed. Outside, a branch brushed the window. The refrigerator went quiet. I closed the book, turned out the lamp, and left a generous amount of space between the words.

In the morning, there was a letter on the windowsill. Just one, a small lowercase e, balanced on the edge of a dry leaf. It might have been a mark in the dust. It might have been nothing. When I opened the curtains, it slipped out of sight.

I went back to the book. The story was exactly where I had left it, with every word in its proper place. Only the empty space after the final sentence seemed a little wider. I held the page against the light and waited. Somewhere in the paper, something was trying very hard to be still.

That evening I left the lamp on. I made tea, opened the book, and began to read aloud. The first paragraph behaved itself. So did the second. Halfway down the third, a comma slowly turned upside down. A capital A leaned against the word beside it. I kept reading as if I had noticed nothing at all.

There are things a quiet house will tell you if you give it time. The stairs remember footsteps. The pipes remember winter. And a page, after enough nights in the dark, remembers all the shapes its words have ever wished to become. I turned another leaf and left the rest of the evening open.