“Yes. Joey looked in your place but you weren’t there. We tried, honey, but we couldn’t stop it.”

“What?”

“It went up, honey. Ruby’s place, and your place.”

“What?”

“Your apartment burned down. Or up, I guess. The fire was on eight and nine.”

“What?”

“I know. It’s terrible.”

“What?”

“What, lady?” the firefighter said, exasperated, hands gloveless and turned to the sky. Cooled shavings from the campfire of my home, delicate and ephemeral, fell from the air and dissolved into dirt in his palm. I opened my hand and caught them greedily, smearing the ashes into the crevices of my own reddened fingers.

“What?” I blinked at Doro. She gazed up at me with her moony eyes, concern and pity spilling from every wrinkle of her owly old-lady face. I stared back, hard and unblinking, not understanding. I had five years left on the lease, I kept thinking. Five more years.

How could my loft be gone?

*  *  *

The firemen said that the paintings themselves didn’t burn, not exactly.

The fire started below, inside the hundred-year-old plaster walls, from an electrical surge. Ruby’s air conditioner plugged into the same ragged socket as her open-current hot knife and her soldering iron, both of which were left on overnight. When the current surged, sparks hit the ancient newspapers used as insulation between the plaster and the stone. The walls smoldered from the inside, burning their way out and up. When the fire reached my materials—all those gases and solvents placed adjacent to canvas and wood—it exploded, then seared so hot that the concrete floor cracked underneath. They think the paintings were simply blown apart. “Burning” was irrelevant, though my books, closest to the door, were sparked by a glowing box of drawing charcoal and they became the ashes that had floated into my hands like so many snowflakes.

Pieces of my paintings were found embedded inside the apartments across the street and permanently fused to the windshields of the trucks and cars parked down our block. The rocks and gravel rooted inside Prudence actually went through my skylights and broke a pair of French doors in a condo two stories up, though two of Prudence’s four panels landed unharmed on my neighbor’s roof. Temperance was straight-up melted into the concrete cracks, a massive, blood-red pile of scorched rubies and carmine dust. Obedience, the first in the series, crated at the back of the stack, remained relatively intact—except for the part where the painting transferred itself to the crate in front and then the fiberglass substrate burned away and incinerated most of the paint, leaving the backside of a mask. The uncrated Humility, Modesty, Chastity, and Purity all went out my windows and into the street and onto cars and buildings and lampposts and sewer grates and asphalt.