time running away cut

 and time becomes palpable, running away like tawny Arabian horses over the distant dune, escaping you, leaving you only this fire and these fragile echoes of hoof beats to bridge the terrible gap between now and then and when the yellow orange of flame has ticked itself down to the cool ashen blue of embers, only then do you hear it. Between the black ribs of the orange cools, down underneath where a scrap of paper inexplicably lingers to remind you that this is how it began, this clipping, this half consumed scrap is how it began.