Not Burned Alive is a journal entry by Jack Rusher, published here Tuesday, April 06, 2004. It is part of Journal.
A wake-up call.
The phone woke me early this morning. I was a little hung over, and I thought it was probably just the fax machine that phones me one morning a week, but I staggered, naked, to the living room, picked up the phone and muttered, “Hello?”
“Are you okay?” The voice on the phone belonged to my ex-wife. She sounded worried and a little out of sorts, maybe close to tears.
“Uh, yeah, pretty much...?” I wondered if she had just woken from a dream in which something terrible happened to me. She, of all people, knew that I would be asleep at that hour.
“There was a fire last night on Orchard Street, three people are dead. I was watching the morning news and I heard them say something-six Orchard Street and I got really worried.”
“Wow, that’s terrible. I didn’t even hear the sirens.”
“I hope none of your friends are hurt.”
“Me too. I’ll walk around the neighborhood in a couple of hours and find out what happened.”
“Well, anyway, sorry to wake you.”
“No, no, I appreciate it. Besides, it’s good to be reminded how nice it is to be alive.”
When I got up to make breakfast, I found this link in my email inbox. The fire in question destroyed a house in Yonkers with the same street address as my building.