Cold January air set my cheeks on fire when I stepped out of the coffee place on Cambridge and Third. I passed the steaming cup from hand to hand while fumbling on my gloves. That was when I saw the headline. “GORE FIRE FALLOUT” sprawled across the cover of the Boston Herald in big red letters. That was why I crossed to get a better look at the newspapers the old woman was selling. Gore Street wasn’t a very long street, and it was my street. The paper had to be long out of date.
Most weekday mornings on the trek to the train station, I saw the old woman huddled under a tatty blanket outside the drugstore, croaking at passersby to buy her newspapers—probably poached from garbage cans. I never paid much attention to the splashy colored headlines of the Boston Herald that she hawked, being a regular reader of the Boston Globe, a newspaper with respectable black typeface.
The old woman wore a dirty yellow-and-black Bruins knit cap pulled down to her eyebrows. She grinned at me and held the newspaper up with one ratty gloved hand. “Pol Promises Probe” ran the sub-heading and, in the background, a blurred color photo of a fire that could have been anywhere in the metro area.
Wind whistled between the canyon of buildings on Third, rattling the pages and making the air feel colder than the already below-freezing temperature. “Where do you get these papers?” I asked. Her teeth chattered so much, I couldn’t understand the answer. I dug into the coat pocket where I’d stuffed the change from buying coffee and came up with a five. Her eyes widened at the sight of the bill. Without a word, she snatched it from me while pushing the newspaper at my knees. She rose, scooping up the pile of papers beneath her and hugging them to her chest. She scuttled out of sight as I headed down Cambridge Street toward the station.
Waiting on the platform, I grappled with wind gusts as I searched inside the newspaper for the headline story. I found the article under a grainy aerial shot of a burned-out building. Most of the story was about finger-pointing between the building owner, the fire department, and the gas company. Possibly a gas leak, possibly in the basement, possibly caused an explosion. At the bottom of the column, the location: 132 Gore Street. That was my address. That was my building. When did this happen? According to the story, one week ago.
A train for Boston pulled into the station. People flowed around me, jostling and grumbling curses. Tiny print crawled along the side of the page with the date of the story. This year. This month. And the day? Next week: one week from today.
I bucked the tide of commuters and elbowed my way out of the station to the street. I listened for sirens as I ran.
Connie Senior lives in Northampton, MA where she is working on the third book in a fantasy trilogy. When not writing fiction, she is the editor-in-chief of an academic journal. More about her fiction can be found at conniesenior.com.