Threshold

The last bird folds its wings into the dimming air, and the trees hold their breath— not silence yet, but its first whisper.

Light bleeds sideways through the pines, turning their needles to copper wire, while shadows pool in the hollows like spilled ink.

A deer pauses at the meadow's edge, caught between the known and the unknowable, its eyes reflecting what it cannot name.

The world tilts on its axis. Nothing dies. Nothing begins. Everything waits.