Two ashen panels, grey-green like cooled smoke, hang apart on the wall. I drew nothing with a tool. I took a fistful of wood ash and let it fall onto the wet shellac the way an hourglass lets go of its sand — meaning to write. But the letters would not come as I intended: the wind stirred the ash, and the act asked for a steadiness that kept slipping away, so the writing arrives faltering, half-formed, already dispersing. What looks like fire is only its aftermath — ash after the burning, running and bleeding into the shellac, settling like time. This is the body measured by its usefulness and used up; it is also the plain difficulty of writing a loss at all — a script that fails in the very act of being made, a sentence no one had the time, or the steadiness, to finish. The two panels do not meet. The sentence stays open in the gap between them, at the threshold where exhaustion settles into residue.