That world he wanted them to know had vanished as smoke deserts the dying embers that made it. - Annie Proulx

Petal, like a persistent song phrase, like a few stubborn lines of verse memorized in childhood. The needle was stuck.

As he cut, the wildness of the world receded, the vast invisible web of filaments that connected human life to animals, trees to flesh and bones to grass shivered as each tree fell and one by one the web strands snapped.

It was not until the next evening that he discovered he had a page from Leviticus stuck to his back.