A Cold Night in Paris

Originally published by the Corvus Review (2025)

Adèle sat in Le Piment Café in Le Marais and stared out the window, watched as fire erupted from the building opposite. People pushed into one another to try and catch the best video of the events in real time. A woman from the news was speaking into a microphone, her back to the flames.

Adèle’s mind was on other things. She hadn’t been to see her sister in hospital for over a week and felt bad about it. Prodding pangs of guilt at the back of her head. A woman from a miscellaneous Eastern European country was talking loudly on the phone next to her. She kept saying something that sounded like ‘pasta’, really enunciating the ‘p’. Pasta. She probably wasn’t even saying pasta, but it sounded like she was. Adèle practised it in her head a few times.

She was hot and muggy. Her wine glass sweated in front of her. She’d woken a clammy mess, only an hour or two ago. Pissed so dark it could have been Coke. It was June. It was boiling. Rolling storms came and went in between the blistering sun, like the tide ebbing and flowing. The backs of Adèle’s arms were badly sunburnt, around where her triceps would be if she still had any muscles. She always forgot to put cream there. She didn’t overly care, burns didn’t bother her. 

The fire across the street had started out of nothing; without warning an ugly, menacing cloud of black smoke erupted from the creperie, orange flames bursting through the windows, eventually being thrown back inside by the powerful jet of the pompières’ hose. The scent of it, of burning wood and melting plastic, had swam towards the café and engulfed Adèle and the other customers. 

The crowd thickened, phones up and filming. Traffic stalled. Adèle was only mildly interested, in fact all she could think of was that she had planned to have dinner there and now she would have to find somewhere else. A couple behind her were discussing what could have caused it. With the speed the fire started, Adèle knew it could only have been an electrical fire. She didn’t bother telling them. 

Someone had asked Adèle the other day how she had come to be a fireman, and why she’d quit. She didn’t correct him that she had never been a fireman. 

Why had she joined? Her sister, forever in and out of hospital with her illnesses, needed someone to care for her once their mother passed, and the army had seemed a good way to guarantee a paycheck. Private nurses and carers and medication weren’t cheap. She’d been put into the pompières, which was run by the army in Paris. They did a lot of the paramedic stuff as well, so it was largely just collecting old dead people from their homes. Could be thirty dead bodies a day, on some days. 

The bodies were fine after a while, she could handle them. Some things weren’t as easy to handle. Personal space was nonexistent in the army, for one. Physical and mental bullying, which got worse the longer she stayed. As her colleagues grew more brazen. She was the only woman in the station at the time.

Firefighters get much more training in the bedside manner, trained to kiss the baby and save the kitten, and it pays off. They still wear the coat of heroism. 

Adèle had asked for a lock on her room, to give her some safety from the testosterone-filled thugs she worked with, the 24/7 porn and the aggressive sexual advances. She’d been refused. 

She would wake up with her male colleagues in her room. Masturbating over her. She once went into the break room to make a coffee and a senior officer was wanking into the pot. She had apologised to him. Fuck knows why.

There had only been two female officers before her in that station. Both had been raped while working there. While serving. She was the only woman firefighter in the history of Caserne Blanche not to be raped in the firehouse. She remembered saying once, half joking, that it was because she was too ugly. She’d said it as a joke but felt somewhere that it might be true. As if she had to come up with a reason why she hadn’t been raped. As if it were her fault somehow.

It had been a cold, biting night, last January. Freezing. Her brain couldn’t focus and her fingers wouldn’t work as she tried to pull her gear on. Her senior officer sent her home, said they didn’t need her anymore, the fire had been put out. A girl had been standing with the officer, it was her apartment that had gone up. Young, in her nightdress. Adèle remembered feeling odd about it, but could think of nothing but the cold. That terrible cold. 

After Adèle had left, this girl had been brought back to the station. Late at night, freezing and alone, unaware the men she was with were not her saviours, were not keeping her safe. She’d been gang raped. By eight of them. 

The girl had gone to the police, the courts, but they threw her out, said she was insane. The guys still laugh about it now. Laugh about gang raping her. That had been a few weeks after Notre-Dame. The same men. The same heroes. Adèle had quit soon after.

Back in the café, the woman had hung up her phone. Adèle’s wine had gotten warm. The fire opposite had been quenched by the pompières. The excitement had subsided, people went back to their lives. Adèle remembered wanting to burn the Caserne Blanche down after that cold night. Unfortunately, fire stations are rather well prepared for that eventuality. Maybe she’d have another glass here then head to the station and block up all the windows and doors and turn on the taps, drown the fuckers.

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