Flames cradled my ankles. Jeers pummeled my ear canals. My skin shriveled. I felt it burn. 
 
In the distance, the autumnal trees bared their bones, swimming in a misty haze. Beneath them, my daughter rested in the wicker basket I wove with my mother when I was teetering on the precipice of adulthood. Before motherhood was a public affair. The basket whose creation I had seen through from wood-gathering, to interweaving, to decorating now embraced my daughter – her feet bandaged in white cotton socks, her supple skin swaddled in pastel fabrics.  
 
I had no choice other than to entrust her guardianship to the hawthorns. Their spindly limbs bore beads of blood and crimson seeped out of their leavy veins. They knew pain. They also knew cyclicality. They were benign soldiers. 
 
It was impossible to perfectly devote my pangs of pain to my daughter; the suffering of my final sighting was compounded by the smoke swarming my eyes. I searched for her flame-sparkled eyes, gazing into their ebony center, as my own melted away in incandescent intensity. This was all the communication I had available to me. 
 
Humans are a cruel species. 
 
Our connection severed as my skin fragmented and drifted away as diffused dust. I attempted to beam my past through the smoky space. Invisible as the communication may be, I held the flashes of images in my mind, insisting on their transmission. 
 
I conjured up visions of my youth. Those were careless days running through the trees, fresh scents of pine swarming my nostrils, weaving together sticks to make miniature houses. I always made the most of my power, even if it was flawed, leading to splinters. Even if I failed. 
 
I promise it was harmless. 
 
The burning smell of crispening flesh haunted me now. I longed for the spiced cinnamon to be added to my coffee in autumn. It used to make me cough with its deceitful, powdered intensity, but it ushered in my appreciation for stubborn survival. I yearned for the smell of bubbling soup – tomato, carrot, even broccoli – of my mothers' winter cauldron. I tasted the candles on my birthday cake adorned with spring flowers: always vanilla, a matrimony to mother nature. Now I have returned to summer – the hottest yet – although this year the burns went deeper than their usual sun-kissed crimson. 
 
See my life. 
 
I wanted her to see me, to remember the signature of my eyes, the paint strokes of hazel patterned above the emerald I inherited from my mother. They are hers too. I hope they will observe more kindness than we did. I hope. I do. I am all of me, I tell her. I am flawed and fallible, I allowed my heart to throb for a man out of a winter's scarcity. I allowed him to leave. I allowed her to lay they with the hawthorns as her paternal protector. My head swarms with clashing choices, denying definite distillation, even my hazel eyes refused clean classification. I had once resented the muddy warts obscuring the grassy green, but now, melting away against the tawny trunk, I accept it all. Now all the colour would be reduced to grey, to ash. 
 
Hold on to my colours. 
 
Not the pirouettes of amber, scarlet, and ochre, but all of it: the green leaves braided into my auburn locks, the indigo undertones of my veins, the blue of the undulating waves of my stained gown.  
 
See all that is me, daughter. See all that is you. This history shall never be written, subsumed into digestible words, although the textbooks will undoubtably try. I hope I'm never captured by such words. My remains will swim in the diluted, dazzling eyes of my daughter. Unheard. Unharmed. Unbounded. 
 
Yes, it hurt. Of course it did. Eventually, I let it consume me. 
  
I closed the scribe of my mind as the flames clawed at my consciousness. I squeezed my eyes shut – this charred chapter was mine alone – I ushed one thought to the dying star of my animation before the curtain of life closed: 
 
Never let them melt you.