Skeletal Shell

I was admiring my bookshelves, as I often do, when I thought how devastating it would be for my collection, along with the paintings and sculptures among them, to burn down.

That evening, as I finished a late dinner, a blue light began flashing against my dining room wall. It was coming from outside. I climbed the stairs to the studio to trace it and noticed that the windows of a house in the alley behind my street were billowing with black smoke. Firefighters were rushing with hoses and torches, and the man who seemed to be the owner was watching with his hands on his head as his house was disembowelled. The neighbours in the round were out in their tracksuits and pyjamas, witnessing the demise of this man’s corner of the world—and offering him a flask of tea, because that’s what one does in England. I stood until the smoke dissipated, noticing how the floodlights grew the shadows of those crossing the path before his skeletal shell, making them freakishly big against the bricks, evoking Jim Kay’s cover for A Monster Calls. I deliberated going to him, but decided it would be too intrusive. He had his community; he didn’t need an audience. I imagined how guilty the crowd might feel, turning their backs to return to their blankets while his were reduced to cinders. I felt it too, without his gaze.

The next morning, having sifted through the haze of sleep, I remembered the man who’d lost his home. I thought how, when he eventually slept in a bed that wasn’t his, he might, for a few seconds on waking, have forgotten the night before. And how, following that, the recollection would hit him like a meteorite.