I am addicted to audio books. I honestly could not prepare a single meal or dust a single knickknack unless I was listening to a story as I performed those mundane tasks.

Yesterday I found myself alone in the house without a single novel on CDs. However, I had a casserole to prepare. Since it was not possible for me to do the first without being able to listen to the second, I searched my shelves until I found an audio book written by ... guess who?

Me!

My book THE BOYS OF SABBATH STREET.

Oddly enough, I didn’t remember ever having listened to it before, and generally, within weeks of it being published, I forget the plots of every book I write. So, I plopped the disk into my CD player.

Curious about what I was going to hear and eager for “the great unveiling,”

I clicked “PLAY.”

Well ... Who knew that I could write something so lighthearted and charming? Certainly not I.

That was SO MUCH FUN.

And when I got to this part of the book below, which, even though it’s fiction, is essentially autobiographical (I was married to a former fireman named Charlie), I thought that you might get a kick out of it, too.

* * *

Years ago, before I had married Jack, I used to stride past fire stations in Manhattan with the exuberant confidence possessed only by a long-legged twenty-year-old girl.

Garbage collectors looked at me.

I ignored them.

Rich businessmen looked at me.

I ignored them.

Fireman looked at me.

I looked back.

That was when it dawned on me with excruciating clarity that all firemen are beautiful.

Or so it had seemed at the time.

In order to confirm my preliminary hypothesis, I decided to make an academic study of the subject matter.

First, I extended my field of inquiry to include firemen wearing turnout gear and riding in shiny red vehicles on their way to a conflagration. While the apparatus they were clinging to tore down the city’s streets, I noted that regardless of their ages, heights, weights, or coloring, they all had intense looks of cocky self-confidence on their faces.

Their eyes said “Danger. Burning building.”

But the juts of their jaws said, “This is what I was born to do.”

I never did get an answer to the ultimate metaphysical question, i.e., whether only men who are superior in every way take the test to become a fireman, or if ordinary so-so guys are magically transformed into masterpieces of design and engineering immediately after they have passed the test.

The second question for which I never got an answer was how I could meet one of them so that I could take him home like a puppy from a pet store. At one point I considered igniting a small, inoffensive conflagration in my wastebasket at work or in my apartment. Fortunately, I met Jack before I was compelled to implement this plan.

Copyright © Shelly Reuben, 2024. Shelly Reuben’s books have been nominated for Edgar, Prometheus, and Falcon awards. For more about her writing, visit www.shellyreuben.com