The fire whistled, hissed, crackled, popped, and roared. Built over a hundred years ago, the house was as dry as dead leaves and yielded completely to the blaze within minutes. Wild orange and savage red flames swayed back and forth as the wind joined the dance, one force amplifying the other, urging it on to greater devastation. Dozens of crows gathered at the far tree line to call out their urgent warnings as the squirrels and mice fled right alongside the Wilsons, each as empty handed as the next. 

Mr. Wilson walked slowly and carefully to the edge of his yard and stood in resigned grief as his house burned to the ground in front of him and his wife. Without a cane to lean on, he relied on a small tree that could barely support both him and his sadness. He had just changed the lightbulb in the laundry room and swept out the mud room, finally. His wife had just rearranged the pantry, moving new items to the back and bringing old items to the front. Their grandson had asked for the set of chairs in the basement and so they brought them up and had just wiped them down. There were bills on the living room table. A bundle of fresh herbs on the kitchen counter. Socks drying on a drying rack.

He shuffled to his car, opened the trunk, and pulled a thin wool blanket out of a scuffed, plastic tote. He wrapped the blanket over his wife’s shoulders and waited. In a town this small, it wouldn’t take long before people started to arrive, and he wanted a few moments of silence to take it all in before the chaos of the fire grew into the chaos of fighting the fire. It was useless to fight this fire, but he knew they would try anyway. He pulled out his pipe, packed it tightly with tobacco, put a match to it, and drew in a mouthful of sweet relief.

“What do you grab in the heat of a fire?” That would be the opening line of tomorrow’s front-page news story, a gentle way of working up to truth, the setup for saying the hardest part out loud⏤that the Wilsons had lost every single thing they ever owned. At 77 and 80 years old that meant losing an entire lifetime of possessions. Everything handed down from previous generations. Everything earned and made and gathered together in this present life. All of their family items. All of their photos. All of her paintings. His entire coin collection.

Copyright 2023 Kesel Wilson (entirely, 100% human-created)

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