What I Saw Through the Almery Windows, Before the Men Came Through

I am always on Ulev Street at night. I saw the light in the upper windows before anyone else did — not fire yet, just wrong, a color the dark should not have. I shouted the house awake and sent the cooper’s boy running for the well-chain. Then I did what I do. I looked.

Two rooms, both lit from inside by then, both close enough to the street that I could see through the glass before smoke thickened it. The eastern room: shutter latched from inside, a chair on its side near the door, the bed made and undisturbed — no one had lain in it that night. The western room: shutter open to the air, the bed turned back, a lamp knocked from the table onto the floorboards, still burning where it fell. I heard nothing from the eastern side. From the western side, once, a sound I will not call a word, because I could not make out that it was one.

The smoke came up black and fast between the two rooms, filling the passage that joined them before either room went past seeing into. By the time the first men had the door down, that passage was gone, and so was any way of knowing what either room had looked like a minute earlier — except to me.

They carried two bodies out to the cobbles. I did not go close. I had already seen what there was to see, and closer up would only have been theirs, not mine — flesh, not rooms. What I have is this: one room shut and untouched, one room open and disturbed, a fire that came up between them faster than either side of that house could have crossed it. I do not say which room means what. I was not there to weigh it. I was there to look, and I looked, and this is what stood in those two rooms before anyone else’s hands changed it.