(Final paragraph of a 5-page story, unpublished.)

I saw the stairwells of the hotel, the walls covered in with pictures and frames, the ceramic girl in the swing hanging from the ceiling of the lobby, the marionettes in the corner, the key cubbies, the generations of artists and writers and musicians milling in the hallways, the dead in the suicide rooms on the lower floors. I saw it all more clearly than I had ever seen it before. I saw the dirt and the bedbugs and the beating heart of New York City. I saw it all, and it was beautiful, and then I saw it all burning. It burned and it burned, the walls of the hotel grew black with ash and crumbled away until there was only me and the man and then we burned and there was only the fire and then the fire burned away and there was nothing left.