Inventory After Fire

What the fire left: one cast-iron skillet, which they say is indestructible. They're right. It sat in the ashes of what used to be the kitchen, seasoned now by temperatures no cooking oil was designed for. The ceramic tile from the bathroom floor, cracked but present. The nails from the walls, bent and blackened, holding nothing. The stone foundation, which is what a foundation does — it stays. Everything else went up. The photographs went first. Paper burns at 233 degrees Celsius, a fact I did not want to know and now cannot forget. The curtains, the books, the stupid painting of a ship we bought at a car boot sale because it was three pounds and we needed something for above the sofa. The sofa went. The bed went. The chest of drawers that I built badly one weekend from a flat pack, the one with the left side slightly higher, went. The mattress, which cost more than I wanted to admit — went. Our daughter's drawings from the fridge. Gone. I remember a purple horse and something that might have been a self-portrait or a balloon. The investigators said electrical fault. The insurance company said the same thing slower and with more paperwork. We moved into my sister's spare room for three months. Then a rental that smelled like the previous tenant's dog. Then here, which is ours now, with a new skillet because I couldn't look at the old one, and a fridge that has new drawings — a green dinosaur, a house with too many windows, what I'm told is the entire family including the cat, who is the large orange shape next to the door. The old house is a car park now. Twelve spaces. One of them is ours in a way nobody recognizes but us.