July 09, 2006
16:50
Two people down the street died last night.
Or they may have died earlier. The fire was last night. My mother was the first person to call the cops. I rang the doorbells of the neighbors, and the smoke was unbearable. When I got back, I was coughing and already smelled like I'd been sitting around a campfire for a long time.
I guess two bodies were found, but they're thinking it was murder, prior to arson.
I'm doing laundry today, in the fog. We're surrounded by fog. It seeps through the trees and rooftops and plants. It makes this place.
On my way back from the laundry room, one neighbor was trimming his plants, and another's garage opened and he stepped out, the same garage owner who recently almost died, and will probably die soon, though I don't like to think about that.
And there are plants, and the same setting as before, except now one house is burned.
I wondered if it was the same house with the old woman who would sit and watch television with the back of her head to the window, with the white and the old white woman afro. But I don't think it was her home.
I wonder who is mourning.
And I wonder if it's strange, for those people who died in that house. I suppose it is strange for me, and that's enough, to consider just how similar the town looks to the town it was before those people died. And I think they probably didn't know they were going to die. I wonder if they would have done something to the town to make it obvious that they'd been here, maybe throw paint down the street and leave big long hard-to-wash-out streaks.
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