The Cinder’s Weight

The hearth has stopped its singing.white-ribbed and glowing with a soft, pulsing ache. I am watching the last flame— a tiny, blue-tongued ghost licking the underside of a charred knot. It is fragile, a translucent ribbon fraying against the weight of the coming dark. There is a specific silence that lives here For hours, it was a roar of gold and defiance, consuming the dry cedar of our history, the splinters of every word we ever threw into the heat to keep the room alive. But the wood is spent now. The logs have collapsed into a skeletal geography,

white-ribbed and glowing with a soft, pulsing ache.

​I am watching the last flame—

a tiny, blue-tongued ghost

licking the underside of a charred knot.

It is fragile, a translucent ribbon

fraying against the weight of the coming dark.

There is a specific silence that lives here at the border where the fire ends and the cold begins. It isn't the silence of absence, but the silence of a finished task. The flame gives one final, frantic leap, stretching toward the chimney as if to catch the hem of a passing star, then sinks back into the velvet grey.

The blue wink vanishes. What remains is a scent like ancient autumn, and the soft, settling sound of ash finding its final place on the stone. The ending doesn't arrive with a crash. It arrives as a slow cooling, a gradual receding of the light until the walls of the room pull closer, and the only heat left is the memory of the glow still burning on the backs of my eyelids. I reach out to stir the remains, but I stop. Some things are best left to go cold in their own time.

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