Ashes

The top headline in that morning's edition of the Daily Ledger read:

"Massive fire destroys downtown library, Daily Ledger newsroom."

Which was kind of ironic, really.

"How did the paper get printed, then?" she asked. She didn't realize she had asked it out loud until Noah glanced up at her.

"Hmm?" he said, his spoon poised over his bowl of cereal, his hand frozen. One lone drop of milk slid down the curve of the spoon and hung there as if it, too, was waiting for Amelia's answer.

She showed him the front page. Noah frowned and said, "They don't print the paper there. That's just where the newsroom is."

"It's still kind of funny," she said, deciding to skip the front page article. She opened the paper, glanced through, and decided to skip the rest of it, too.

"Not really," said Noah with a shrug.

"Just trying to make conversation."

"It's depressing." He finished the last bite of cereal and stood up, straightening his tie. He paused a moment to look at the full-color picture adorning the front page of the cast-aside paper. "A shame. I always liked that library." He spoke as if someone else had just taken the last piece of a dessert that he didn't like very much but was going to have the last piece of anyway because it would be a waste otherwise.

"I have work," he continued, stopping only to drop a perfunctory kiss to his wife's head.

"Have a good day," she called to his retreating back, her lips forming the words automatically, their meaning lost in years of habit. Noah gave no sign that he heard her.

Amelia wasted exactly five minutes staring at the table before her gaze was inexorably drawn to the newspaper photo once again. The fire had consumed both buildings in total, leaving nothing but dangerously unstable blackened husks. She could tell this just from the picture: the library and the newsroom building seemed nothing more than ashes and smoke molded into two large rectangles as crooked as a two-year-old's drawing, which somehow had kept their shape long enough for the picture to be taken. She almost expected to see it all drift away between one blink and the next.

But it was just a picture, not even a TV news report, so the ash remained where it was.

She looked at the clock.

One hour to make sure Noah was well away, settled in at work and ensconced in business calls and meetings. Thirty minutes to take the bus downtown, and another thirty to get back. Return at least an hour before Noah was due off work, just to avoid any possibility of running into him.

That left about six hours in between. Five, to be on the safe side.

She went to the closet and opened the box labeled "Sewing supplies," pulling out not needles and thread and scissors, but a camera and film and a tripod.

Noah didn't forbid she have any hobbies. Noah probably would have liked to know that his wife was passionate about something, if Noah actually liked anything these days. But Amelia liked her secrets, even if she had to fabricate them. Photography was something new and something she liked, but she didn't think she was very good at it. She liked taking pictures of sad things, but there was nothing in the resulting prints that spoke to her, nothing that stirred an aching in her heart or the sick feeling of tragedy. She wasn't sad enough to capture it in a lens.

She wasn't anything enough.

An hour and a half later she stood self-consciously on the sidewalk running alongside a bustling downtown street, a riot of color and noise and smells and movement that washed over her senses but left them untouched, like she was in a scene in a movie and everything was too staged to make an impact. She could barely see the burned-out buildings from this spot, and she was as close as she could get. The entire block was cordoned off with barricades, the name of the fire department spray painted across them in black block letters. She stood with her black camera bag slung over her shoulder, staring off into the distance and feeling stupid. Of course she should have known. The buildings were unstable, dangerous. No one was going to allow civilians to walk right up to them.

Amelia took out her camera anyway and looked through. She could get a shot from here, where a corner of the former library jutted out black and withered against the blue sky and the intact, modern glass buildings. The picture could be commentary on urban decay in the midst of seeming prosperity, or perhaps of the destruction of history in tradition in the face of modernity. But she could see none of these things through the lens. It looked like a burned out building in the middle of downtown, nothing special and nothing tragic, only vaguely disconcerting in a something-in-the-background-has-changed sort of way.

She just wasn't good enough. She didn't feel enough. There was only bitterness on her tongue, and ashes in her heart.

Amelia put her camera away, turned around, and stopped in horror when she realized she was staring straight at Noah, and that he was staring straight back at her.

Hooking a strand of errant hair behind her ear, she tried to smile brightly. "Noah! What are you doing? I thought you were at work?" She wondered if he had been sent to a business lunch downtown today, even though it was still early for lunch. She wondered if he was sick and had left early. She wondered if he had been fired. She wondered it all in the same idle way, as if the real answer didn't matter.

"What are you doing here?" he parroted back, and the two of them stood there in silence for several long seconds as Amelia tried to come up with an excuse. She settled on an unconvincing, "Nothing."

No wonder she couldn't take pictures. Her brain was as dead as her heart.

"I didn't know you liked photography," he said, nodding at her bag. "When did this start?"

She didn't want to wallow in the remains of her shattered secret. "Why are you downtown, Noah? Did something happen?"

He looked up and past her, past the barricades, all the way to the ruined corner of the library. "I wanted to see."

For the first time in years she felt something springing up in her throat, something her mind slowly deciphered as surprise. "Me too," she said before she could stop herself.

He looked at her, and maybe there was something like surprise on his face, too.

She cleared her throat. "Why did you want to see?"

"I told you," he answered. "I always liked this library."

"Ashes" is copyright © K. B. Cunningham 2009

Back to Random Shorts