Beyond Recognition

1

The fire began at sunset.

It filled the house like a hot putrid breath, alive. It ran like a liquid through the place, stopping at nothing, feeding on everything in its path, irreverent and unforgiving. It raced like a phantom, room to room, eating the drapes, the rugs, the towels, sheets, and linens, the clothes, the shoes, and blankets in the closets, removing any and all evidence of things human. It invaded the various rooms like an unchecked virus raiding neighboring cells, contaminating, infecting, consuming. It devoured the wood of the doorjambs, swarmed the walls, fed off the paint, and blistered the ceiling. Lightbulbs vaporized, sounding like a string of Black Cat firecrackers. This was no simple fire.

It vaporized the small furniture, chairs, tables, dressers, all dissolving in its wake. It refinished and then devoured the desk she had bought at a weekend flea market, a desk she had stripped of its ugly green paint and lovingly resurfaced with a trans parent plastic coating guaranteed by the manufacturer to last thirty years.

Longer than she lasted.

For Dorothy Enwright, it was more like a camera’s flash popping in the dark. It began long before any clothes or rooms were claimed. It began as a strange growling sound deep within the walls. At first she imagined an earthquake. This was dispelled by the quick and surprisingly chilling spark on the far side of her eyelids. To her it began not as heat but as a flash of bone-numbing cold.

It burned off her hair, the skin on her face-and she went over backward, her throat seared, unable to scream. In a series of popping sounds, her bones exploded, brittle and fast, like pine needles dumped on a fire.

The toilets and sinks melted, a sudden flow of bubbling porcelain, running like lava.

Dorothy Enwright was dead within the first twenty seconds of the burn. But before she died she visited hell, a place that Dorothy Enwright did not belong. She had no business there, this woman. No business, given that a member of the fire department had received a threat eleven hours earlier, and the person receiving that threat had failed to act upon it.

By the time the fire hoses were through, little existed for Seattle’s Marshal Five fire inspector to discover or collect as evidence. Little existed of the truth. The truth, like the home of Dorothy Enwright and Dorothy herself, had gone up in smoke, destroyed beyond recognition.