a body is simply the pause a strand makes while passing [78W]

One strand lifts off a cedar burning in Yakutia, slips through the stoma of a larch downwind, becomes sugar, becomes bark, becomes ash again once lightning finds that stand. Rain hands what remains to the Lena, where silt beds it for a century until a sturgeon takes it up as carbon in muscle, and a net takes the sturgeon, and a mouth in Tiksi takes the net's whole intention without tasting any of this. Current ferries the rest past Sakhalin while a stack in Ulsan works the opposite shift, hauling drowned forest out of coal seams back into weather. Monsoon carries particles over the Bay of Bengal before they settle on a mango leaf, pass into a goat, leave as milk, arrive in a child's blood by Thursday. Elsewhere a spaniel sneezes an identical atom onto Lisbon tile; a mop lifts it; a drain accepts it; the Tagus forgets which of its molecules were ever anyone's. Nothing departs. Forms borrow. What wore cedar wears cartilage now, wore turbine yesterday, will wear lichen after the grid fails and cools. Call it migration if scale flatters you, though the strand has no route, only hosts, and hosts have no interiors, only rates. Here is where the story turns on its teller: smoke never entered you. Entering is the word bodies invented for their own porousness, and a body is simply the pause a strand makes while passing, slow enough to be named, brief enough to be released, warm.