INCINERAT

It had been five days and the land still smoldered in wisps of curling smoke. All the homes gone, including his. The grey trails rose like mindless cobwebs spun from the earth only to be dispersed by the winds that blew in from the sea just beyond. Smoke from grandparents' beds, children's toys and family albums wafting up in unheard prayer. Things yearning to still be.

Here he grew up, fought bullies, fell in love and wrote his first poem. The Five Cent Diner sat at the corner of Main and Holland. The counter still visible under the ashen collapse of the roof and coffee cups cracked and sullen rested where no patron would ever go again. It’s where he met his first wife. Huervos Rancheros and conversations till dawn until a different cruel fire erased that as well. He turned left onto Spring St. though there was no longer a sign. It would only be another block.

Everything unrecognizable save for the Pierson’s palm tree which curled in the air like a giant burnt matchstick. Next door was home, a sullen rectangle of mangled debris in the incinerat landscape. He knew where they would be. He stepped gingerly over the scorched remains of the living room, glass cracking under his boots, books like ashen bones spilled forth into a scattered pile like some hellish exhalation. They would just be to the left past the family couch now rendered into a dark chaos of springs like some deolate garden.

He kicked away the charred boards and got on his hands and knees like some penitent and sifted through charred nails. He recognized the herald now reduced to a pale curl. Underneath he found them. His father had died five years before and he carefully scooped his ashes commingled with char into a small tin. A substance that can never be burnt farther, the ultimate reduction of a being. He shut the lid, headed to his Jeep and headed back east. The bulldozers would be here next week.