At Pearl, I had first dibs on colors, picking out moss and sap green, pale scarlet—fat, cigar-tube rolls, soft, delicious, pure potential. Jonah smiled at me, gave me his discount, asked about my day; our usual routine. Then I bought a coffee, an egg sandwich, and a carton of orange juice from a bodega and headed back home.

It was a day like any other.

I thought that regular day would be spent finishing a painting called Prudence—pouring a bucket of glowing resin across her barbaric landscape of grease and detritus, before melting one of my new oil sticks into a puddle using a propane torch from the restaurant depot on Bowery. My mind was already there, up in my studio, as I made my way down Dutch, though I did notice that there were, for some reason, a lot of people on my block, and they slowed me down, but I was still thinking about my painting, about what was next. When I arrived at my front door, there was a big guy in a sexy costume blocking my entry. Confetti fell down around him like little paper snowflakes. Doro must be having a party, I thought.

“Excuse me,” I said to the muscleman in the very realistic fireman’s costume blocking the door, in that absentminded city way, Please move, I am a person too.

“You can’t go inside, miss,” he said, all rough around the edges.

“I live here,” I said, exasperated, pointing to my name on the buzzer. “Ninth floor.”

“Number nine?” he asked. “We’ve been looking for you.”

It was then that I realized his “costume” was in fact very durable and covered in scuff marks—not from being ripped off in a million living rooms, but because, of course, it was real. Everything came into focus at once: the red fire trucks in the street, the rubber of the firefighters’ suits, the smell in the air, the flakes of ash dusting the shoulders of his jacket. Smoke poured out the top of my building. My fellow tenants were standing across the street, drinking coffee, shaking their heads. Ruby, red-faced and sullen, was wrapped in a blanket, talking to a blonde with a clipboard.

“What?”

“But.”

“How.”

“When?”

These were the words that fell out of my mouth. I don’t know if the fireman replied. I wore somebody else’s skin and none of it was right. My vision narrowed into a tunnel: I could only see the door beyond him and I wanted to get through it. I dropped my bag and felt a hand on my shoulder. The hand squeezed and pulled me away.

“Thank God,” Doro said, hugging my inert, alternate-timeline body. “I didn’t know where you were. It happened this morning. Ruby had an electrical short. She was asleep. You banged on the door and woke her up. Oh, honey, I’m so glad you’re okay.”

“Is everybody okay?”