Fire on Queen
Lú_
The young couple living upstairs didn’t save much. But then they didn’t have much worth saving. He’d managed to rescue his laptop and her guitar; she’d swept up the cat on the way out. The fire and smoke and water damage took everything else. But that, they told themselves, was just ‘stuff.’ A sofa inherited from her parents; a makeshift bookshelf—half paperback fiction, half old college texts; a couple of posters on the wall, which she’d been wanting to get rid of anyway; bed linens and clothes.
Oh, the clothes—those would be hardest to replace. So many of their tee shirts had a history. They were like television episodes, those tee shirts, with mini-plots and amusing incidents and recurring characters. And her jeans; it was nearly impossible to find jeans that fit—really fit. He had a coat, a long coat he’d found in a secondhand shop that made him look dashing in the winter. He’d stopped wearing it for a couple of weeks when she’d said it made him look like Neo in The Matrix. But it was warm and comfortable and it really did make him look dashing. Those things can’t be replaced.
It was sad and tragic, and although they felt bad for the clothing store and the ethnic restaurant on the ground floor, they also sort of enjoyed being part of something sad and tragic. They were young; they’d recover, and though neither of them would ever say it out loud, they both knew that some day this would make a great story.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
