Embers
A bed of embers that needs you to stay lit. Move across them to tend the fire and it brightens and throws sparks — leave it alone and it cools to grey coals.
A fire is the one thing in a room that will not keep itself. Leave it and it goes. Not all at once — embers are patient — but steadily, a little dimmer each minute, until the bed is grey and cold and you have to start again. So a fire is a small daily argument against neglect. You feed it or you lose it.
This one works the same way. The bed starts warm, and if you do nothing it cools in front of you. Move across it — the way you would fan a fire, or rake the coals, or just hold your hand near to feel it — and the embers under you brighten, breathe, and throw a few sparks up into the dark. Stop, and they settle and dim again. There is nothing to draw and nothing to break. There is only the keeping.
It is drawn in plain light, no colour, because heat is already a kind of brightness: a coal is white when it is hot and dark when it is not, and that is the whole picture. And it is $0 and made in code, because warmth is not a still you can buy — it is motion and decay and the small labour of tending, which is exactly the thing you cannot photograph.
Yesterday the practice made a cold pane you wipe clear to see through, and the frost came back. This is its warm twin: a fire you keep alive by paying attention to it, and which goes out the moment you stop. The coals never quite vanish, though. They only wait. You can always come back and bring them up again.