Free Rogue Island by Bruce DeSilva

“Just one World Series championship in my lifetime, that’s all I ask,” he used to say. His heart quit pumping the winter after Mookie Wilson’s grounder skidded between Bill Buckner’s legs.
    How do you explain it to the uninitiated? How do you explain why you draped a Curt Schilling jersey over the shoulders of your dad’s gravestone after that glorious night in 2004? How do you explain why you sat by his grave with a portable radio last fall so you could listen to the clinching game together?
    â€œI’ve gotta have something to care about, Veronica,” is all I said. I was just realizing she might take that wrong when the phone rang. I grabbed it on the second ring.
    â€œYou!
    fucking!
    bastard!”
    â€œCan’t talk now, Dorcas,” I said, and hung up.
    Later, Veronica and I discussed whether she’d stay the night again. I’d need her car if there was a fire, she said, but I suspected she really liked the way it felt. I liked the way it felt, too, and expected to like it a whole lot more once we had the test results. We agreed it would be just an occasional thing. The toothbrush could stay, and she could have her own key, but feminine products were out of the question.
    That night, before we slipped under the covers, I moved the police radio to my side of the bed. About four in the morning, it woke me. Something was burning in Mount Hope. I found her car keys and tried to dress without disturbing Veronica, but she stirred, heard the radio chatter, got up, and pulled on those jeans.

16
    Police had Catalpa Road blocked off, so we parked and walked in through a flurry of embers.
    Rosie’s crew had given up on saving the four-story rooming house and was soaking down the triple-deckers next door and across the street to stop them from catching. A window exploded, showering a five-man pumper crew with shards of glass.
    At least no one’s going to die tonight, I thought. The wood-frame building had been empty since September, when it was condemned by the city housing department. The winos and welfare mothers who had been living there protested that they had nowhere to go, but the building inspector explained it was for their own good. Some of them were still sleeping in junk cars and cardboard boxes.
    My next thought was the kind that always made me feel dirty at times like this: Just a flophouse and no bodies? This might not make page one.
    The fire was putting on a show. Flames jitterbugged in the windows. Hungry red tongues lapped at the eaves. Majestic fireballs rose from the roof. I don’t know how long I stood there, mesmerized, until the wind shifted and a cloud of smoke sent me sprinting for air. When I could breathe again, I looked around for Veronica. Two minutes later, I found her scribbling notes in the lee of a fire truck. Gloria was there, too, methodically snapping away with her Nikon digital camera.
    â€œI worked late in the photo lab,” Gloria said as she adjusted her focus, “and was on my way home when I smelled the smoke.”
    Cracks loud as gunshots made me jump, and the roof collapsed into kindling. When the rubble cooled, this one wouldn’t need a wrecking crew—just a front-end loader and a dump truck to haul the ashes.
    At dawn, Veronica scooted back to the paper to write while I hung around to feed her notes in case anything newsworthy happened in the mop-up. Firemen were curling their hoses now, except for a couple who were still drenching the wreckage, making sure. That’s when I caught a faint whiff of something new in the air.
    I found Rosie by a pumper truck.
    â€œYou smell that?” I said.
    She sniffed and said, “Oh, shit!”
    Odors are particulate. When you smell an orange or savor the aroma of my cigar, molecules that were once part of those objects are entering your body through your nasal passages. So what do you suppose is cruising through your bronchia when you smell the candied stench of