Show me

“What do you mean ‘gone’?”

James took a deep breath, staring once again down at his plate before pushing it to the side.

“The night that I was brought to the hospital,” he strummed his fingers against the table top before reaching up and pushing them through his deep, brown hair, “Someone burnt the entire place to the ground.”

I gasped, covering my mouth with my hand, “Why would someone do that?”

He leaned against the cushion of the booth, “I’ve been trying to figure that out for years. That night,” James looked at me with a haunted expression, shaking his head, “Would you like to go see it?”

I felt like everything around me had stopped. Like time had frozen around me, but James and I remained the same. All sound ceased to exist.

James was giving me a morsel. A tiny glimpse into the life I knew nothing about.

“If you’ll show me.”

****

When James told me that his town was gone; I never expected what we walked into.

The town was in a remote area about fifty miles outside of Savannah. Th