Toast and Coffins

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The fire was out. Forked tongues of incandescence no longer licked out from gaping windows, high above the street. Cascades of glittering sparks had died down to an occasional glowing sprinkle. The loft building was nothing more than a gutted seven-story chimney spewing up a monstrous toadstool of smoke against Broadway’s red glare. Yet now, with pumpers uncoupling and hose companies taking up, the commotion in West Thirty-eighth Street was at fever pitch.

Brassy gongs clanged the recall for hook-and-ladders. Soot-smudged men in wet rubber sloshed through gutters dragging limp serpents of canvas. Ruddy light from emergency truck headlamps turned sidewalk pools into mirrors reflecting the crowd surging at the fire lines. Still, the tall, lean-faced man kneeling on the curb paid no attention to all this roaring activity at his elbow. He squinted morosely down at the figure stretched out on the sidewalk... and his nostrils flared like those of a horse at a feared, familiar smell.

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