There was a fire in your former home, it was on the news. On the ground floor, a Greek restaurant scorched and soaked, second and third storeys engulfed. The room where you once wrote, a black mouth open to the sea. I walked past the ruins on Easter Sunday, spooning mango gelato from a waffle cone, along with the other sun seekers after a record month of rain. Children zigzagged past in a daze of pleasure, old women shuffled in glittering saris, tourists held up cellphones to the mile-long train carting its load of coal. You brought me here, once, in my youth when nothing impressed me. The buildings on the beach too faded to charm, paint flaking, balconies rusting from salt air— I liked shiny and new, black leather, smoked glass, it was the 90’s. Grimaced as you crept up the side stairs, hand on rail, your careful old-man’s gait rousing my disgust. You wanted to share this relic of your former life, the lair where you’d written your famous books— it was your ex-wife’s by then, of course. It still smells like home, you said when you unlocked the door. I wandered through modest rooms strewn with pillows, sticky with your past. Every surface smudged with sand, the air moist and personal, clogged with intimate history. Your old desk at the window overlooked the beach. Look at the wonderful view, you said— but it was a grey day, the tide far out on a stretch of wet beach where a few forlorn seabirds staggered. All of it was dumpy. I couldn’t wait to leave. Now it was burnt up, like so much else, and I was walking past in my middle age, partner at my side. I looked up at your room and then away, as if from the scene of an accident. Blown-out windows gaped open, blasted and gone. He and I walked along the pier, the warmth of the sun crowding our faces, our exposed necks. Later we would go for fish tacos and laugh at how he tried not to notice the teenage waitress, blond and blue-eyed, still baby-faced.
Burnt
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