Flash Fiction Fridays - April 2025
Nineteen Seconds
Happy Friday, folks. I procrastinated a bit with this one, but managed to get it out on the last Friday of the month. Hope you enjoy!
Nineteen Seconds
When the fire started, none of us knew there were kids in the building. I just want to make that clear. As far as we knew, the old railroad station was full of drug dealers and squatters and God knew what else, assuming it had anyone in it at all. And if it did, and some scumbag had dropped a lit cigarette onto their lice-infested mattress at four o’clock in the afternoon, well, none of us were going to rush in and save him.
So yeah, we pulled out our phones, our cameras, our tablets. We hit Record and watched the fire spread from the first floor up to the second. We panned up to catch the smoke rising over the skyline like good little amateur cinematographers. And in the backs of our heads, best case scenario, we figured we’d have something to send into the evening news.
On the famous video, the one they used in the court case, there’s a bit right around the thirteen-second mark where you hear someone crack a joke about grabbing marshmallows to make smores. Another guy laughs, and you can just start to hear the sirens float in over the background noise. Then, two seconds later, we all hear the scream.
Most people who see the video already have the facts. They know that Mark, 17, met his girlfriend Julia, 16, in the student parking lot after school. They know that the two of them crossed the street to the 7-11, where Mark’s beard and a steady poker face scored him a pack of cigarettes and two raspberry slushies. They know that it was Julia’s cigarette that ignited a stack of plywood on the first floor, Mark who noticed the flames, and Julia whose scream carried out over the city.
Us, we didn’t know a thing.
As one, we panned over to the window, where two pairs of arms flailed helplessly at the smoke surrounding them. We searched for the faces that drifted in and out of view behind the thick black clouds. We watched the edges of our screens, waiting for the hero of the story to rush in and do something - anything - to help.
And then, a few seconds later, we watched two kids die.
***
The way the media spun it, you’d think we got off on it. “Teenagers Die While Dozens Watch,” like we’d showed up with lawn chairs and buckets of popcorn. Legal experts wrote columns on the difference between moral and legal obligations to rescue, as if we’d just sat there with our arms crossed and insisted it was none of our business. YouTube celebrities and podcasters had a field day with it.
But there were two words that nobody mentioned, in any interview, on any show.
Nineteen seconds.
The amount of time it takes to walk from your front porch to your mailbox, or to open all the windows on one side of the house. The time it takes to water a pair of plants or tuck your daughter into bed. A slow moment to put on a pair of tennis shoes, to stand in front of your refrigerator - blank-faced, door open - looking for something to eat.
The amount of time between a first scream and a last scream. And maybe, just maybe, the amount of time it would’ve taken to save a life.
In the end, legal obligations or no, guilt always has its due. We found ourselves staying up late to watch everything but the news. We drove to work on any road that didn’t lead by the old station. Some of us drifted away from our old hobbies and found volunteer work at the Red Cross on weekends.
A friend and I signed on at a volunteer fire station twenty minutes from where we lived. On the first day of training, a man with thick arms and a thicker mustache stood in front of us and preached the tenets of fire safety while we all took notes. “With sufficient fuel,” he said, “you average house fire will double in size every thirty seconds.”
Me, I still find myself counting by nineteens.
This gave me the chills.