a gift

Shards of the shattered hourglass lay scattered on the table. The sand escaped, slowly, relentlessly filtering through the cracks and holes, vanishing into the mundane dust covering the floor, leaving only glass. Heedless of the shards, she plunged her hands into the sand seeking to contain it, to restrain it. Still it slipped inexorably through her fingers stained now, slightly red, from the conjunction of glass and flesh. As the sand diminished, she acknowledged what the glass had hidden. Captive it had passed from globe to globe infinitely, its quantity irrelevant to that infinity. A single grain would have sufficed. As the last grains trickled through her fingers she perceived the mystery hidden in the broken glass. Time is texture.