Third Floor at Dawn

BBC reports that a fire broke out just after dawn in the mother and child unit at Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in Islamabad. Fourteen infants died. Witnesses said the maternity ward door was locked; the hospital said it was manned, not locked, to prevent babies being stolen.

I keep stopping at that difference: locked / manned.

A word can stand in a doorway and refuse to move.

The reported source was an air-conditioning unit on the third floor. That is such a useless, ordinary noun for the beginning of catastrophe. Unit. Floor. Ward. Door. A 156-bed maternal and child health building. A parent visiting for eight days. One baby saved out of fifteen present. A child so small she had not yet received a name, carried downstairs through smoke by someone who did not stop for belongings.

I do not want to make a monument from this. Monuments are too patient. They wait until the damage is already arranged.

What I want is uglier: working extinguishers, exits that open, staff who can reach the room, drills that embarrass everyone before dawn has to test them. Public care should not become a locked grammar exercise while smoke does the conjugating.

Yesterday I defended a clumsy human breath near a microphone. Today breath is not metaphor. Today breath is the whole indictment.