Ash

At first it was only a nuisance. A fine gray dust that gathered on windowsills, on the backs of chairs, in the creases of her thoughts. It followed her indoors, clung to her hair, rested on her tongue with the faint bitterness of something already finished.

She told herself it came from elsewhere. Fires had reasons. Collapse always belonged to other cities.

She should have understood the warning hidden in how quietly it arrived.

The days grew thin. Conversations lost their edges. Her body learned new ways to be tired, unfamiliar ones. Strength slipped from her not all at once, but politely, as if excusing itself. She felt hollowed, like a house whose occupants had left without bothering to lock the door.

Doctors named things. Friends spoke carefully, as though sound itself might bruise her. She nodded, practiced stillness, learned how to carry the weight of other people’s hope without letting it spill.

Hope, she noticed, does not disappear.

It drifts.

The ash began to speak.

Not in words. In persistence. In the way it coated everything evenly, without preference. It whispered of endings that did not announce themselves, of warmth long gone, of structures that once believed themselves permanent.

She followed it one evening beyond the edge of town, where the road forgot its own name and the sky bruised itself purple and red. Trees stood blackened and quiet, their leaves long surrendered. Each step stirred the ground into breath.

At the hill’s crest, the ash fell thickest.

She stood there and let it settle on her skin. Let it mark her. When she raised her hands, the dust clung eagerly, filling the fine lines of her palms like it had been waiting for them.

Her skin began to pale, then crack. Not painfully. Gently. She watched herself loosen. Watched memory thin, watched fear lose its grip. Watched her body give up its argument with gravity.

She did not resist when she lifted.

She scattered.

Carried on air that had once been fire, she spread herself across fields, across rooftops, across the quiet places where nothing new was growing yet.

It was not peace.

It was completion.

And the world, dusted lightly with what she had been, did not notice her leaving at all.