Читать книгу Smithereens - Terence Young - Страница 10

For a while we called it the good fire, the best fire, the fire that saved us

because we were insured, and the insurance paid for all the things we could never afford,

the new wiring and plumbing and paint and sofas and stereos and computers

and clothes and pots and pans and bicycles and carpets and curtains and state-of-the-art

smoke detectors for the next fire, but every once in a while, an image of our

old basement kitchen will shove its way to the front row of my thought parade

and I will believe, as I do sometimes in dreams about things I’ve lost to disease, the years, the

insatiable ocean, that it still exists somewhere, behind a door that I have only to open

and walk through to find our son, seated at the makeshift bar, eating a snack after school,

my wife down on her knees trying to clean the hopelessly stained lino, our daughter

about to arrive with her boyfriend, and me too, fiddling with the coffee maker that started

the whole conflagration in the first place, only this time deciding not to repair it, un-

plugging the thing instead and carrying it wisely to my workshop where all toys and appliances

went to die, and leaving it there, returning with a bottle of terrible homemade wine

which I pour into a couple of glasses from the cupboard where we used to store our

hippy goblets made from clay and the poisonous lead decanters handed down, the sorts of things

we never replaced after they burned, like the Victrola and my father’s pewter mug, or couldn’t,

like our youngest’s kindergarten rendering of a tugboat—blue hull, aquamarine ocean, blowing

billows of smoke into a cloudless and benign sky.