16 of the 49 Souls lost to the flames that Monday afternoon were children on a school bus of whom the oldest was a girl named Tommy who liked the fact she was named Shirley, Jen or any other girly name. She had just turned 12 the previous Sunday but considered every day to be a momentous step forward towards her 13th birthday when she would be officially and irrevocably a teen.
They were going home after the end of another Monday school day no different then any other school day in all respects except for one: as the flames licked high into the sky and the ashes of the dead were swept with the wind until they were one with the smoke and the smoke was one with the jet-stream and as days turned to weeks and weeks turned to months and months to years and so on and so on… it took over half a century - exactly 57 years, 11 months and 23 days - for a gust of wind to finally settle and release what was termed as dust were it to be discovered and analyzed but in reality was not only a flake of skin off of Tommy’s shin but was the final ash to settle to the ground, after having circled the globe over 23 times, be a part of 7 hurricanes during 3 different decades and when she almost settled down to the ground over 20 years after the fire she escaped the depth of a 78 year old man’s throat when he breathed in deeply, taking her within but promptly - with a tickle of his tonsils - setting off a sneeze and sending Tommy back into the air for another 36 years.
And as sad as the loss of Tommy to her family and friends was, the son Tommy would have had were she to not have died that Monday would be a son she loved so much that he would have become a figure of global importance ‘fore Tommy’s son was supposed to do much with his life including the discovery of a cure for almost 60% of the types of cancers plaguing mankind through a highly potent mutation of the root of a plant in Southern Mississippi which he should have fiddled in his makeshift lab for a mere 2 years before testing it on mice with instant success and then sharing his findings with the FBI because he wasn't a scientist or biologist or any kinda ’ist but just a guy who liked nature and was an ameatur bio-engineer and followed his instinct which proved to be correct and went to the FBI because if you’re not an actual ‘ist and discover the cure for cancer who do you share this information with, anyway? So the FBI was good enough to share his findings with he thought and so he did...or would have… had he been born… and had Tommy survived…
But she had died and he was never even here and no one ever knew - no one but you - that the cure for Cancer was lost that Monday in a fire when a group of children lost their lives.