What if I lost all the detail, and could only tell you about things in a general sense? All the edges had turned a little metallic—or was it just ashy?—slightly silvery, a kind of ghostly powder, hard but not exactly bright. There was still something there, lumped into sacklike nouns, a little adjectival sprinkle sifting out of the open seams. It was like a skeleton, like a burned forest filled still with the uprightness of the former trees, their spacing maintained by their crusted stumps, leafiness and liveliness now only inferred from the gray material so consistently covering the charcoaled ground.

-Angela Woodward, from End of the Fire Cult