By Leah Tallon
Seven months ago, the house I had been living in with my boyfriend, Dave, and my miniature dachshund, Molly, burned to the ground while we were checking in for dinner reservations in downtown Milwaukee. We’d been gone all day, visiting his grandmother, applying to my dream bookstore, getting haircuts and, somewhere in the middle of all that, 20 minutes away, an electrical wire inside the wall of the office was sparking, the outdated cloth-covered wires catching fire after months, maybe years of luck finally running threadbare. The flames grew quietly in the center of the house and ate their way through family heirloom bookshelves full of paperbacks, an oriental rug, to the coat closet and the connecting wall to the living room, up through the ceiling to the bedrooms, to the roof. It filled the spaces between rafters under the floorboards and ripped through the basement ceiling. In one of my recurring dreams, I still hear Molly, my best friend for 6 years, scared and trapped in her kennel, barking while the smoke puts her to sleep and she dies alone until the firefighters can drag her kennel out into the clean snow. While support beams and walls crumbled, a friend of a friend posted on Facebook about the house closest to the park being a cloud of smoke, “There are fire trucks everywhere, they can’t find the owners, does anyone know who lives there?” A close friend saw the internet S.O.S. and called us, still 20 minutes away.
That’s where this essay that I don’t want to write starts but it’s not the real beginning. It’s not what this is about. There’s no beginning because I can’t find one.