EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

Exactly Where Memory Left Them

May 29, 2026—Stamford, New York (Mom's House)

I knew I would remember tonight while it was still happening.

I've long stepped back from the line of fire, yet sometimes I'll still hear the screams and realize it was just a dream. At the time it was all I knew, and all that the world had tried to convince me was worthwhile.

There was a really bad incident years ago. I heard it over the radio at two in the morning and showed up in my personal vehicle on my day off. Everyone was ordered away from the wreck, and someone asked, "A girl? You're putting a girl in charge of rescue? Are you insane?"

The rescue was successful. From that night forward, I was known as Rescue Girl. I was praised for my skills yet for the duration of my career, nobody at work knew I had autism.

The 557 came later. It was a unit identifier from a long-since-closed agency where I spent many years of my life. Rescue Girl was often paired with 558, my immediate supervisor and personal friend. Everyone knew him as Wild Bill because he had served a tour in Iraq as a medic.

Wild Bill eventually married and started a family. His family asked him to step away from high-intensity work, and he did. He ended up overseeing the maintenance and construction of critical underground infrastructure.

Chief Dave's path was different. Budget cuts eventually closed the station entirely. He moved to Florida and spent decades teaching. When he announced his retirement, former coworkers and students from across his career sent letters. In his final message to us, he said he might disappear, but that he was safe, well, and wanted whatever time remained to belong to him. He told us he had been honored to work with and teach so many remarkable people.

We were still young enough to believe every goodbye was temporary. Eventually reality collected its debt. Somewhere southbound, with the windows down and the radio low, life started making sense again. There are friendships that pause and friendships that end.

I have never been someone with a wide social orbit. Throughout most periods of my life, there is usually one friend who becomes woven into nearly everything. Matt was that person when I was young. Amelia and Maddie are now.

Once someone reaches that level with me, my loyalty becomes indistinguishable from family. I've only seen crescent moons in eyes three times in my life—Penfold, Amelia, and Maddie.

I returned to Mom's house and found that the same small cracks in the blue stone sidewalk had grown larger. Oh well, I thought.

I walked across the street to the local bar and counted the footsteps from Mom's front door to the entrance, just as I had years before. The screen door slammed behind me, announcing my awkward arrival like punctuation.

Theresa had a Coke waiting for me before I even reached the bar stool.

And then I realized something.

The man sitting beside me talking about baseball still had the same voice that sounded like the part of childhood I survived. It was my childhood friend, Don VanEtten.

Don was present with the fire department when my father died. I hadn't seen him since. Time had carried both of us elsewhere. My father moved me to another school in eighth grade, and the simple certainty of childhood dissolved the way it usually does. One year becomes two. Two becomes ten. Then decades pass and suddenly you're sitting in a bar across the street from your mother's house wondering where everybody went.

Yet there he was.

He knew who I was immediately. How could he not? We had sat next to each other beginning in grade school. Over the years we became close friends. His family lived a block from the school when we were kids.

Later they moved to another house behind the local pharmacy, owned by my friend Andrew's father, who was also our family pharmacist.

I hadn't thought about some of those details in years. Seeing Don brought them all back at once.

Don has done well for himself. He built a good life. Listening to him talk about baseball, I realized that success had very little to do with why I was happy to see him.

We talked for awhile. Before I left, I told him it was really good to see him again and handed him one of my business cards.

It seemed like the practical thing to do.

Despite the years, despite different schools, different careers, different lives, and all the distance accumulated between then and now, I don't think I will ever forget our friendship.

Some people disappear entirely.

Others somehow remain exactly where memory left them.

The voices themselves often survive longer than the years do.