Triangle factory fire, March 25, 1911

A lector had been hired for the next day. To read both light entertainment texts as well as news of the day. The job was to read on the factory floor, a service to the workers, who often paid by cobbling together out of their own meager pay, collectively. A passing of the hat. To escape drudgery. People will pay for escape.

It was a hot day. Oppressive.

Birds ducked into crevices of buildings seeking respite. Shade.

It is quiet. No one wants to expend the energy. Stoke the fire dwelling inside.

The nearby library branch is full of people trying to beat the heat by reading it away. A process of illusion.

Inside the factory the sound was that of the clatter of machines. Adding to the heat of the day.

The factory manufactured waist-shirts, a fading fashion for women.

A man leaned out a window on the ninth floor. He filled his lungs with the warm air. The outside air. It is often a problem in cities, man-made shelters, cages, the matter of inside/outside air. Free circulation. The bird looked at him. He looked at the bird. There was a knowing. It passed between them.

The man looked up. The bird looked at the man. The man looked down. The man looked at the bird, wistful.

There was smoke coming out of some of the windows. There were sirens. Someone had noticed the smoke below. They saw the smoke above. Rising. There were people exiting the building. It was being evacuated. Emptied. Abandoned. Like leaving a sinking ship. They could not communicate with the ninth floor, only the eighth and tenth. There were fire trucks below, and men. And people were filing into the street from both directions, away from the building as well as toward it.

“Ladders!” And the ladders were set up. And they only reached to the sixth floor. A dead stop.

And it’s interesting because, if they had gone higher, people would have talked about the time they went down a ladder without ever having to climb up. Over tea. And people would be slightly amused. By the casual chatter. A tea-time observation. Quickly forgotten.

And there were more people at the windows. Breathing the warm air. Warmth being relative. And the birds saw people had gone to the roof. Unable to go down, they chose to go up instead. A few of them looked down. Among them were managers and they looked down at the people. Oddly, they were safe. But they did not feel safe. They would not feel safe for a long time after. They tried not to think of it, to shift their attention.

And they looked down at the street. And those on the street looked up at them. And the man at the window looked at the bird. And the bird looked at him. Knowing.

Not many people got to the roof that day. The stairwell leading to the roof became impassable right after the stairwell leading to the street. It took three minutes. There was another. Another stairwell. But it was chained shut. The supervisor who held the key had already left the building and was looking up from the street. Helpless.

There was a metal fire escape to the side, people climbed out onto it. So many tried to escape onto it that the metal structure groaned, and quickly, but in shocking slow-motion, failed catastrophically. Poorly constructed, as cheaply as possible, to save money, to increase profits, it gave way, crashing full to the street with screams from above and below. There were no survivors.

The elevator operators made three trips back up and down, through the heat and the smoke. They could not make a fourth. Between trips some of those left above had tried to slide down the cables to the top of the elevator cars. The weight of their bodies made the elevators inoperable. Human error. The heat melted the cables.

The fire licked out some of the windows, tasting the outside air.

The man looked at the bird. He jumps, defenestrating himself onto the street below. The bird watches from his perch. The man’s place at the window is filled by another. She will not be the last. In as much as a factory hand is replaceable. 

The child found the bird dead. The child looked at the bird. Put it in a box. With some grass. Do birds eat grass? Looked at its beak and feet. Stiff bird. Relax. Things are well in hand. The child says a few words over the bird and makes some motions. A budding magician. Cigarette butts. Children believe in magic. Not magic as entertainment, but magic real. Trying to bring the bird back to life.

“Get away from that Nasty Thing!”

And it was left on top of a stacked square of bricks, salvaged from an old building. There was also a bucket of doorknobs.

A woman falls through the air, alight. Still burning on the street. A man and woman kiss before they jump together, holding hands. A courtship. A courtship beginning and ending. Still, on the sidewalk.

Blood flows down the gutter. To the sewer. Underground. 

There is the sound, unforgettable. Of a body hitting the pavement from above. Onto other bodies preceding. An unsteady rhythm. A syncopation of the heart.

They tear right through the nets held by Firemen below.

Greenwich time. In the mean-time. They worked fifty-two hour weeks for seven to twelve dollars a week. The youngest were fourteen. Most were women between fourteen and twenty-three. The oldest was forty-three.

The owners had a history of suspicious Fires, after a product goes out of fashion, and with it the workforce. A matter of insurance, pending.

Louis Waldman, having followed the sound of sirens from the reading room said, years later, that being on the street at that time was a mad frenzy. An agonizing eternity. Hysterical. Men wept.

“Were the bricks from the Triangle building?” asks the attendant.

“Nah. Still there. Call it the Brown building.”

“But what of the Lecter?” asks the attendant. “The one who was to come the day after.”

“He was left to read on his own time,” says the Storyteller. “But was left much poorer for it.”