I was standing there at the corner, the corner where the smaller street intersects with the slightly wider one. The smaller street was lined with squat tiny houses subdivided into tiny apartments, while the wider one had taller houses, narrow and tall and slender and stretching up all the way into the sky, making you crane your neck to see the tops where the houses angled into quaint triangular steeples like churches—kind of like churches, almost like churches, but not really. The road with the tall houses was wide enough that there were cars parked on both sides of it, big metallic husks flanking the road, immobile and innocuous, and it was funny to see them like that, these machines that were designed for ceaseless motion being so still. On the smaller road, just next to the intersection—almost directly on the intersection, only two houses back from the southeast corner of the intersection—was my house. Not really my house: the house where I lived. I lived in one of the apartments that the house was subdivided into, and had lived there for five or seven or nine years, something like that. It was a nice enough apartment—there were several windows, and the water that flowed out the taps became hot fairly quickly after you opened them, and though there was a mouse who lived in the kitchen, it was the only one as far as I could tell, and I didn’t really mind his being there, and he didn’t chew through my electronic cables or anything like that. We had an understanding is what I’m trying to say. All in all, this apartment was nice enough, and so when I was standing there at the corner where the thinner street intersects with the wider one, looking up at my apartment, I felt that I should have been more upset to see the flames gushing out of the windows, red and orange and eager. But truthfully, I didn’t feel upset; when I saw those flames, flooding out the windows and licking up the exterior wall of the building, climbing up and up in these crazed, irrepressible motions, I didn’t feel fear, or panic, or grief, and what I felt, instead, was a kind of relaxed, steady excitement, pulsing coldly at the base of my neck.
The fire burned and burned and then finally it stopped, and by the time it stopped there were several other people standing on the street corner alongside me, some of us looking up at the building with dull, glazed expressions on our faces and others looking up at the building with tense, worried expressions on their faces. When the flames stopped their rolling and wailing and vanished, they left the building sort of unrecognizable—to be honest it was completely unrecognizable. It was charred black, as though it were a pile of coal in a barbecue pit, or as though it were the skeleton of an animal that had been left to rot on the side of a freeway.
