Fire

A few years later, the investigations conducted by the department of disasters showed that the fire had originally broken out in the northwest end of the town quite close to the harbour, where a youthful owner of a broken heart contemplated burning all the letters he had received from his beloved the previous year, on the wooden floor of his room on the upper floor of a villa in which he lived. The fire, it transpired, rushed out gleefully from the villa, chattering in its usual crackling voice which was heard by a few of the surviving neighbours, and may be by a lot more who did not survive, and set ablaze the pyres in the harbour and the timber wharves of the port that had existed a long time ago but was fondly remembered by a few old people, before it burned down the two hundred odd wooden ships that had dropped anchor in the secret reveries of the poor, many of them being workers at the port or the shipyard, orphans or prostitutes. The fire then crossed the river on a long wooden bridge  and got back to the island town to consume everything that had the quality and density of desire and desperation pressed into defined forms and inhabited the imagined areas of the lives of the townsfolk dead or alive; elaborate teak coffins that the poor wanted to buy for their dead parents, the large crucifix and the altar made in rosewood, that the Bishop always hoped would be gifted by rich sinners some day, hundreds of books that the local poets dreamt of publishing, countless pretty dresses that generations of native girls kept themselves pre-occupied with through the rainy evenings for centuries, a large number of carts, wagons, boats, wooden coconut-oil presses, copious quantities of sun-dried fish, and warehouses full of pepper and other crops that the farmers, traders or fishermen always longed to produce or acquire being among a few things worthy of recording, not to mention thousands of human victims, women or men that dwellers of the town had imagined of, so as to fill various needs of their lives, and infants that had been earnestly anticipated but had never arrived, for these are the things usually not expected in any report by fire investigators. 

P.S. This post is again special.