Flour and Ash

“Make flour into dough,” she answers, “and fire will turn it into food. Ash is the final abstraction of matter. You can just brush it away.” She tacks a sheet of paper to the wall, dips her hand in a palette of flour and ash, applies the fine soft powders with a fingertip, highlighting in chalk and graphite, blending, blurring with her thumb. Today she is working in seven shades of gray. Outside the door, day lilies in the high flush of summer- about-to-be-fall. Her garden burns red and yellow in the dry August air and is not consumed. Inside, on the studio wall, a heavy particulate smoke thickens and rises. Footsteps grime the snow. The about-to-be-dead line up on the ramp with their boxy suitcases, ashen shoes. When I get too close she yanks me back. She hovers over her creation though she too has a mind to brush against that world and wipe it out.