Our Lady of Angels Fire: Half-Life of a Hole

A hole he carried with him half his life, shaped like his son, that his boy never again filled. Twelve boys and girls did, some pushing his son back into the smoke-filling room.

He caught them all cleanly except one, his orphaned arms too tired at the last, breaking her fall so that she only broke her arm, her forever deformity. 

Each child darker than the last, from the thickening smoke; evolution, he thought, even at the time, a believer who believed in science: we all came from the same cradle. The first ones lighter, the skin of others purely dark. But he could never evolve from death. 

You can’t, except to the spirit world, which he did at fifty-two, dreaming of his eight-year-old boy, windowed, smiling, waving his darkening alabaster statue of Jesus, waiting to catch his father as he rose.