Daily story, October 13, 2024

She donated what she could. You don’t burn a perfectly good pair of jeans just because of what happened to you in them. And donation had its own kind of purification: the good deed balancing out the bad, the things being anonymised in charity shop backrooms where volunteers priced them up in terms of physical condition only. She almost felt she could go in and buy them back herself.

The rest she piled carefully, so it would catch well and burn clean. She knew how to build a fire. Dryer lint to letters to books to furniture, then the less flammable things, once the flames were already established. Warm on her skin; she wished she could see the glow on her face. She thought, without regret, that everyone would have understood, if only she had built it in the garden.