After the Fire

The house kept its shape

long after the fire was done with it.

Brick remembers heat.

Glass remembers how it fractured

into a language too sharp

for hands to gather.

We walked through what remained

as if stepping into a paused sentence —

walls open to sky,

ceiling ribs exposed,

the air still whispering

what it had swallowed.

You kept saying

it could be rebuilt.

Your voice moved carefully

between the beams,

as though even smoke

had feelings left to bruise.

I bent to pick up a hinge,

warped but intact,

and wondered how much of a door

is necessary

to call something an entrance.

The dog we never had was named Arthur.

Ash does not look like endings.

It looks like snowfall

too tired to continue being weather.

You stood where the kitchen used to be,

describing islands and marble counters,

future cabinets rising in clean geometry.

I watched the blackened outline

on the far wall —

the ghost of a picture frame,

untouched by flame

because something had shielded it

for a while.

We did not talk about that.

Rebuilding, you said again,

is an act of faith.

But faith, I have learned,

requires forgetting

what burned first.

The wind moved through the beams

like breath through an empty lung,

and I tried to remember

where the staircase curved.

It is easier to reconstruct

than to admit

there was a moment

when neither of us

reached for the alarm.