An inferno consumes a house.
A hand ticks on an office clock.
Smoke peels away from parted lips.
Ice cubes clink in whisky seas.
Someone knows something.
Lines of documentation segmented by the banded light of venetian blinds. Smells like perfume and cigarettes in here. Paper moulders in forgotten boxes. Somewhere uptown, three bodies lie chilled on steel tables.
Charred and broken. One big, two little. Father nowhere to be seen. Prime suspect.
So why’s he sweating sat in my office chair, his wife and kids shaken but alive in the corridor outside? Whose bodies are laid out in the morgue, blackened by fire?
Not who, says the father. What.
Paddy Dobson
29th July 2021