"No..... What's going on...?"
Before the sentence could end, a bag fell to the sidewalk. The seams of the bag tore, scattering everything.
A broken water bottle, a torn bound book, and three coins that rolled in different directions.
Someone's feet ran forward
"Don't go inside!" A man's voice called from the crowd. "Boy, don't make the mistake of going inside!"
But the boy didn't stop.
He ran the way people do when their bodies realize something but their minds haven't yet processed it.
He was running towards his home. The buliding still stood. Barely.
The roof had caved on the left side, and orange light streamed in and out from every window like something alive and patient.
The crowd had arranged itself in a wide arc along the road. Neighbours in their night clothes, a woman with both hands over her mouth, a child clutching a fencepost, staring unblinkingly.
Two people came to stop him, but he found his way between them without slowing down.
The front door was gone and in its place stood a rectangle of light.
He passed through it and went inside.
***
Inside, the air was entirely different. It was heavy. It possessed weight and texture. The smoke was so thick that one could taste it, and beneath it, was something sweet, something that had no business being in a fire.
Burnt cedar wood. Liquid fabric softener. It was the distinct scent not merely of a burning building, but of a burning home.
The boy passed through the front room. The furniture had been reduced to mere silhouettes. The sofa, the low table with the chipped corner, the curtains his mother had argued over in three different shops, everything had transformed into nothing more than outlines and glowing embers.
He turned slowly, scanning his surroundings.
"Mom."
His voice came out utterly flat. He lifted his voice toward the ceiling, toward the walls, toward anything that might carry it upward.
"Dad."
Nothing answered but the fire. The fire, which crackled and writhed, speaking in the language of things as they shattered and fell apart.
He was not weeping. His eyes were too wide open for tears. Wide, dry, and constantly shifting, taking in every detail.
He moved down the hallway, stepping over a charred beam that lay askew across the floor, and ducking beneath a cloud of smoke that hung suspended at neck height.
A door to his left had warped inward, twisting out of shape. He placed his palm against it.
The wood was searing hot. He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
It was a room that had been utterly consumed by the flames, everything within it was a uniform, ash like brown and had collapsed into ruin, yet, along the edges, a faint, lingering glow remained.
He closed the door and turned around.
On the hallway wall, somehow still hanging there, was a photograph.
The frame was askew at one corner, the glass had shattered in a diagonal line that cut across the bottom left of the image.
But the image itself remained. Three people stood before a railing, the kind of railing that is painted white but rusted at the base. A man held a woman tightly in his arms.
Between them stood a boy, perhaps twelve years old, squinting against the sunlight, his smile stretching from ear to ear.
The boy stared at it, and his knees gave way beneath him.
He hadn't chosen to fall. One moment he was standing, the next, he was down, both knees pressed against the scorched floor, arms hanging limply at his sides, gazing at the photograph the way one gazes at something they are already mourning, because some part of them already understands that when they look again, it will no longer be there.
"They would have called. If they had made it out, they would have called."
"The car is still in the driveway."
"When I walked through the door, there was no one in this hallway."
The fire continued to advance behind him. It had devoured the staircase and was now spreading down the hall on both sides, patiently, methodically, just as water flows when it has all the time in the world.
The heat intensified against his back. It pressed against his neck, his arms, and the thin fabric of his school jacket.
He felt none of it.
His hands rested on his thighs. The photograph stared back at him from the wall.
"I should be feeling something. There has to be something, anything. Heat. Pain. Something to confirm that this is..."
The fire had reached the edges of the frame. Tiny blisters began to form around the wood, opening and closing in the heat.
The boy did not move.
"The fire..." His voice had dwindled to less than a whisper. It was a sound meant for no one. "Why don't I feel anything?"
He wasn't asking a question. He paused, tilted his head slightly, and stared at the shattered glass of the photograph.
"I should feel the heat. Shouldn't I?"
A tongue of flame licked against the fabric of his jacket sleeve, yet the cloth did not burn.
"Cale."
A voice came from the wrong direction. Not from the rooms. Not from the door behind him. Not from any place where the wind could carry it.
It came from the space behind his eyes, a woman's voice, slow and unhurried, the two syllables of his name falling with equal weight, just as she had always spoken them.
Something shifted in his expression.
It was not a smile, nor was it the absence of one. It existed in the space between the two. Lips pressed tight together, corners barely upturned, eyes unchanged.
He looked out at the fire raging around him, at the burning walls of the only home he had ever known.
"Is this because of you?" he asked the burning air. "Mom?"
The fire flared.
It had come within mere inches. One of its walls, orange on the outside and blue within, bearing down upon him with its entire accumulated weight.
He saw it coming, and yet his hands remained steady.
He closed his eyes. And the sound ceased.
Neither the sharp crack nor the low rumble of the building settling, everything fell silent. The house grew still in a way that burning houses simply should not. Cale opened his eyes.
The fire hung suspended in the air, hovering right at the very tips of his fingers. It had frozen. It hadn't gone out, rather, it had frozen solid.
The flames stood motionless in place, like a painting of fire, like a single frame frozen on a film reel that, just moments before, had been spinning freely.
He looked down at his hands, then back at the fire.
In the space directly before him, darkness began to gather. It did not drift in like smoke. It coalesced, growing denser, acquiring depth.
It took on a shape with no distinct boundaries, a form that seemed to cleave through the frozen air, and from within it, two points of light condensed, resolving into something more distinct.
Eyes.
They gazed back at him with the look of eyes that are waiting, waiting for someone.
Kale's hands rose. He had made no conscious decision to do so. Both his arms lifted from his sides and reached out toward that dark shape, his palms open and his fingers curled loosely.
It was the gesture of a child reaching out for something that, in reality, had never truly been there.
"Mom...?"