The first time I saw her was inside a trailer fire, down by the old highway. It was an mid-century unit, and boy did it light up quick. By the time we got there, the back half was fully blazing. We got the hoses on, but then the owner runs up, a walking skeleton of a lady, teeth mostly gone, screaming about her babies inside.

“What do you think, boss? Seems pretty damned methed up to me,” said Tico.

I shook my head. “Gotta check it out.”

The front door was a total no-go, but I was able to enter through a sliding glass door around back that had already shattered by the time I reached it. I listened for children crying but didn’t hear a thing over the roar of the fire.

Down a narrow hallway choked with smoke, I entered a back bedroom. I saw the cats first. Whatever color they’d once been, they were black and gray now, the life well out of them. Then I saw her. She was a tall woman, the same height as me, six foot even. She wore a dress of finely woven red feathers that matched her flowing hair. She picked up one of the dead cats and held it close to her breast.

“Poor thing,” she said. “Poor little thing.”

“Lady, we’ve got to get the hell out of here,” I shouted over the roar of the fire, but she just rocked the cat like a baby, cooing softly to it.

“You’ll be warm forever now, little one,” she said. The heat was even more furious by then, the cat practically turning to ashes in her arms, but the woman only smiled, ignoring the fire around her.

“Now!” I shouted, but she turned her back to me, walking deeper into the fire. Then the roof around her started to come down, forcing me to back away.

I didn’t tell Tico or any of the other guys at the station about what I’d seen. I’m sure I would have sounded crazy. Who knows, maybe I’d gotten a whiff of the wrong smoke when I walked inside that trailer.

I probably would have forgotten the whole thing, except that a month later, I saw her again.

The time, we were over on the north side of town, a five story job, all lit up. And this time it wasn’t cats. Apparently, a dad had come home to find the whole place lit up and went running in to get his wife and kids. None of them had come out.

This time, Tico and I went in together. We found the dad in the stairwell halfway between the 2nd and 3rd stories, passed out from the smoke but still alive. Tico slung him over one shoulder and trucked him out of there, promising to come back as soon as he could.

I had to push through the door of the apartment. When I did, a hot rush of air practically knocked me off of my feet. I had to crawl in as I watched the ceiling burn above me.

The lady sat on a burning bed, the blacked body of a small boy in her lap. She stroked his charred hair, which snapped cleanly into her long fingers.

“Naughty boy,” she said. “You tried to run. But I forgive you.”

She looked up at me, the fire reflecting big and red in her eyes.

“Now you,” she said, smiling. “You run in to visit me. My kind of man.” She licked her lips. Then she started to remove the straps of her dress, revealing milky shoulders. “But you never seem to want to linger. What’s the matter? Don’t you want to stay?”

For a second, I had the crazy urge to walk toward her, to start taking off my mask and gear. But then I heard a cough. Over in the corner, under the lifeless body of his mother, was a second boy, this one alive.

Before I let myself have too much time to think, I ran for him, picked him up, and ran out of there as fast as possible.

Right outside, I ran into Tico. I was only a few steps out the door, when we heard the stairwell come down, the concrete fully crumbling in a cascading failure. We got clear of the building and delivered the boy to the EMTs, who had just arrived on scene.

“I’ve got to get back in there,” I was saying, over and over again, maybe to Tico, maybe to myself.

“It’s done, boss, it’s done,” Tico was saying, but I couldn’t help myself, I kept walking toward the building. It took the whole rest of the crew to restrain me.

Since then, I've been stuck on desk duty. Yesterday, there was a big job downtown, a whole complex lit up. It seems like there are a lot more fires than usual this year. A lot more. Maybe after things settle down a little bit, they’ll let me back on the truck.

In the meantime, I find myself playing with my lighter a little more often. Smoking cigarettes for the first time since my 20s. At home, all alone, I make soup for one and watch the gas burner the whole time, sometimes even after the water is boiling. Sometimes even after my food is fully charred.