What Started This Mysterious Square Fire, a Ghost? Or What?
A devilish London mystery, just in time for the holidays.
Witness if you will a real estate agency in London, an office constructed from the familiar: couches, tables, various magazines, paper listings taped to the window offering homes soon to be inhabited by those of the same sort of flesh in which our spirits reside, those who walk among us each and every day. An ordinary scene, an ordinary city. All is as it has been for everyone, it seems, except for one woman: Ragini Patel.
Ragini Patel: Fulham resident, passer-by, ordinary woman. An unintentional but not unwilling traveller into the extraordinary, on the sidewalk outside of the Lettings Company shop in Fulham Road.
Now witness if you will a woman's mind and body overtaken by an otherworldly combustion, a woman forever charged with being a stranger to herself. Ragini Patel. From GetWestLondon:
A passer-by helped save a closed shop and flats from going up in flames after spotting a sofa which had mysteriously caught fire in a square shape.
...
The long-time Fulham resident instantly called the fire brigade who had to smash down the estate agent's door to put the fire out which started in a square shape and slowly spread out to burn the entire sofa.
She said: "I was just going to Sainsbury's in the morning when my neighbour's son told me there was a fire in the shop. I looked in and a square-shaped fire was burning into the sofa. It was very odd. I called the fire brigade straight away then started filming because it was very bizarre, I couldn't figure out how it had started."
The time is a bit after Ms. Patel called the fire brigade. The place: still London. The cast of characters: Clyde Johnson, from the shop, and the police, all sharing the common urgency of men faced with an unexplainable phenomenon. Again, from GetWestLondon:
Clyde Johnson, from the shop, said: "We're very thankful to Mrs Patel for phoning the fire brigade but we still have no idea how it started. It's a fire resistant sofa luckily so it minimised the fire but we don't know if it was caused by a laser pointer or maybe a magnifying glass or just the sun shining in oddly. The police can't figure it out either."
In time they might choose an explanation to cover this phenomenon, be it the sun, a laser pointer, a lit cigarette left unattended, a closing argument to sweep from the mind that which cannot be explained. But like tenants in an apartment, the square fire on the couch in this office's presence will never vacate absolutely. Scratches on the walls, an unexplained scent you only notice having left and come back, mail sent to the same being—a stranger to you, still, yet oddly familiar. It will linger forever...in [London].
