Marked

As we pulled into Toyokawa station yesterday we saw a burned out house. I stared at it a lot, but not as a house, as an artifact. The fire must have had really intense heat because it burnt holes in the ceramic roof tiles. In some places the clay tiles looked like they had melted. I thought about kiln temperature settings, the temperatures of different glazes I've worked with,and whether the tiles had broken from exploded air bubbles, something inside that exploded, and other sort of forensic questions. Then the train pulled away, and I didn't give it another thought.

It turns out, that house belongs to one of my students and her aunt died there on Saturday. She didn't even have a uniform to wear to school today, so her casual clothes stand out as a mark of fire and death in the sea of sameness.