Fire

As he trudged across the muddy front yard toward yet another shell, Joe wondered how many more of these he had in him. Five years until retirement. Sometimes five years is just a blink: didn’t his daughter start school the day after she left the hospital nursery? But walks like these - through the shattered pieces of people’s lives – they never seem to end.

When he was younger – manning hoses or even later directing an entire scene – he didn’t think much about them – the people. Too much danger, too much adrenaline – he had to act, no time to think. But now that he had “made it”, promoted all the way to Chief Inspector, it was his only job – thinking. How had the fire started? Who was responsible? How could it have been prevented? And so day after day he walked – through the ashes, through the pieces, through the sorrow.

Wind chimes tingling softly startled him. They could belong to this place. While the rest of the structure was gone, most of the back wall was still standing; maybe an untouched patio or deck behind it. He had never gotten used to how fire routinely melted the mundane around the horrific.

He approached where he guessed the front door used to be. Joe always tried to enter a scene through a door. It seemed disrespectful to do otherwise: to step over what had been a wall moments ago as if the home and the lives it contained had never existed.

He made his way past piles of rubble, many of them spitting last gasps of steam into the air as the hose teams made sure nothing was left that could reignite, and dodged odd bits of framing hanging at crazy angles.

He could pick out bits and pieces of normal life – part of a child’s picture, a warped tin of what looked like the finger paints used to make it, what had to be a fake pearl necklace, the stones misshapen by the heat. And he encountered some of the usual survivors – a brick fireplace, a safe in what was likely an office and most of the plumbing, though in the downstairs powder room even the PVC pipe had melted so that the P-trap was no longer recognizable.

Joe knew that eventually all of it – the ashes, the remnants of life and what remained of the structure - would give up the stories he needed to hear. They would tell him who the inhabitants were, how they had lived and what had created the mayhem he saw all around him. He would write his report and find the bad guys if there were any, or warn the world to be careful if there weren’t. And the folks who lived here would recover – bodies first, psyches a bit later.

But none of that would happen without work. And so he walked, shielding himself as best he could against the heat and the embers still floating in the air and the sadness. He walked.