My House in Flames

It was a snowy Friday evening in January, my mother had just lit candles, and we all settled down on the couches to relax and schmooze. A neighborhood friend of mine came over, the little kids played on the carpet at our feet, and we relished the warm coziness amid the grand snowstorm going on outside.

And then the smoke alarm upstairs started beeping.

I looked over at my mother quizzically. “That’s strange, that one never goes off,” my mother said. Sometimes when the kitchen got smoky, the downstairs alarm went off, but never the upstairs one. “I wonder if it’s broken,” my mother mused. “Chaviva, can you run up to check that everything’s alright up there?”

The shrill alarm was making me nervous, and I didn’t want to go. My older sister volunteered to check instead, and after a minute, we all heard her shriek as she came dashing down the stairs, screaming at us to leave. We weren’t expecting that. Since when do fire alarms actually mean a fire? Everyone jumped up in a panic, and a moment later, we heard a loud explosion as we rushed out of the house into the freezing cold snow. There were about two inches of snow on the ground, with flakes still falling all around us. None of us were wearing coats; some of us weren’t even wearing shoes, and I was actually wearing crocs — not the best choice of footwear for the snow!