Around the sofa a carefree flow of words. She leans forward in silence, taps off an ash, then rounds her mouth, brings up the lipsticked end, sucking and sending a waft of thought out upward, easy, away from the slant of the light that billows under the lampshade. In darker, restless knots the breath has braided grey clots that saunter by the curtain behind her, sullen. Smoke binds with fabric, greying pleasure or release, grace or rigidity, pulling away the face under the grey cake of skin. She snubs out all, thinking nothing of the leaded ascension, the scented line of pollution.
Fires silence to life.
The blade came easily across the years that parted as the wood popped under the blade, the anonymous trees halved, split, kindled. At night, coming home from a party, the sky above muffled with the next big snow, the lights of my car would plunge down the dark just for a second as I turned in the drive, and graze across the bolt I left on the stump where the axe was jammed. Nothing shone but the clear, brief stars of sap that eased from the unseamed rings of green wood, small tears of amber. They were gone as quick as the headlights swung across the porch, and I'd kill the engine. Inside fire slept, awaiting fuel.