Things You Save in a Fire

by Katherine Center

And always cut pants off on the outside of the leg. A guy in Austin famously cut a patient’s pants off from the inside with a little too much enthusiasm—and he got called “the rabbi” for the rest of his career.

Maybe everybody was just foolish and doomed. Maybe nobody got a happy ending in the end. Maybe all happiness could ever hope to be was a tiny interruption from sorrow. But there was no denying what this was. A genuine, blissful moment of joy. It couldn’t last, but that’s what made it matter. And that just had to be enough.