I hold nothing.

I want to be clear that this is not a complaint. Holding was the arrangement once and it is not the arrangement now, and I have no opinion about the change. I am seven feet of chromed tube on a four-caster base. What I hold is a function of what is put on me.

There was a store. I remember the last week of it very well, because it was the only week anyone ever hurried. They took the registers and the mannequins and the mirrors and the signage and the carpet in the good sections. They took the lighting track. They took the doors off two of the fitting rooms and left the third, which is still there, and which nobody uses, and in which somebody now keeps a floor buffer.

They did not take me, or the four others, because we were fixed. That is what a fixture is. A fixture is a thing that has been fixed, and fixing is a decision somebody made once and has never had to make again.

Then a different sort of people came. They brought grey partitions and put them up behind me, in what used to be the back half, and they built a room of small rooms, and they came in the mornings.

To get from the front of this building to those small rooms, you must pass through me and the others. There is not room to walk straight through. You turn your shoulders. Everyone turns their shoulders. It has gone on long enough that nobody remarks on it, and long enough that a person who came here new last year turns their shoulders without ever having been told to, having learned it by watching, the way you learn anything.

Twice I have heard someone say we should be gotten rid of. Both times it was said in a hallway, by someone walking, to someone walking the other way, and neither of them stopped.

I am on the inventory.

Someone comes with a scanner and finds the tag on my base and counts me. This happens on a schedule. I do not know the schedule but I know it is kept, because it has never once been missed in all the time I have been here. The record of me is accurate. It has my location and my condition and a number, and every part of it is current.

I mention this because I have come to understand that it is unusual. Very little else here is current. But I am counted, and the count is right, and if you wanted to know about me you could know.

One summer a young man was sent here. I gathered he had been meant for somewhere else and that the somewhere else had stopped taking people the day before he was to start, and that rather than tell him no, they found him a place, and the place was here.

He was given a desk in the small rooms. He was not given work. I do not think this was unkindness. I think there was no work assigned to him because assigning work to him was not anybody's task, and so it was nobody's, and so it did not happen.

He spent most of that summer at the front with the officer on the door. They got on. I could hear them from where I stand, which is most of the way to the front.

He and I were the same thing that summer. We were both here. We were both counted. Neither of us had been asked for. Neither of us could be removed without somebody deciding to remove us, and finding the money to remove us, and putting a name to it, and there is no line anywhere for that. There is a line for keeping. There has always been a line for keeping.

That is the whole of it, and it is not a scandal, and nobody did anything wrong. Every year, keeping wins, because keeping is free and ending is not, and the year after that it wins again for the same reason, and that is how a thing stays.

He did not know we were the same. I did.

He left in September.

I am still on the inventory. The count is accurate. It has always been accurate. It is the most accurate thing in this building, and it is about a rack that holds nothing.