Free THE POWER OF THREE by Billie Sue Mosiman Page A

 
     
     

               
     
     
                   
     
     
                   
     
                   
     
                  Fire --the killer, the rapist of dreams, the taker of innocence.
                  It was before eight o’clock in the morning and I had been up late reading the night before. I came awake…
                  I swam up from sleep, dragged as if from a pounding surf--choking, suffocating. The house was on fire, I knew it instantly. Fear scoured me inside out with claws of sudden panic. I first sat up, disoriented, already afraid, but not knowing why. In seconds I was out of the bed wearing only what I had slept in—bra, panties, a half-slip. The bedroom door was closed, which drove me toward it in leaps. It was never closed. I saw smoke billowing from around the door frame and beneath the door.  
                  Brady ! I knew the house was on fire and my baby was out there beyond that door somewhere, in all that deadly smoke. There was no more thinking beyond this. Adrenalin and fear took precedence over thought.
                  Door flung open, I rushed down the long hall leading to the living room. Black and pungent smoke issued from there, presenting a wall of darkness shot through with flame. My heart wasn’t even in my chest anymore. It might have died it beat so hard, it might have stepped out of my body and flown away from the event unfolding before me. One thing I knew: my heart was breaking, was broken, was dying. I ran forward breathless, racing into the darkness of the smoke calling and calling, “BRADY BRADY BRADY !”
                  Reaching the doorway that opened to the living room, I saw the flames were as alive as a living monster can ever be. It had a life of its own, a grinding, roaring life devouring everything in its path in seconds, in nanoseconds. I glanced left to the open kitchen and it too was full of smoke so I couldn’t see beyond the edge of the wall. PHONE . I made to grab for the wall phone, but it was melting and I jerked my hand away from it. Flames licked up the wall like liquid running uphill, pulled by backward gravity, eating away at the wall, grasping at the bottom edge of the plastic phone. The panic I felt now was so high I was no longer a human in all senses of the word. I was a dead woman walking. Because I knew this very moment had changed everything forever and chances of my son being alive were so low I might fall down and stay there for the flames to find me because if that was true, how was I supposed to live?
                  Yet I ran, pushed from behind by blind panic, pulled from ahead by hope. I ran like I was on fire when I wasn’t, ran back down the hallway calling, calling, weeping, gnashing my teeth, dying inside. I wasn’t running to save myself, to hell with me. I was racing the destruction, moving as fast as I could to out-distance the monster. My one reason for living at that point was to save my son. I got to the spare bedroom door and it was closed. I flung it open praying Brady was inside, safe. Be here! I thought frantically. I found Eddie hiding behind the door. I had forgotten about him. He backed out, his eyes wide and round. He knew the house was on fire, I didn’t have to tell him. It was in his eyes, it was in the way his hands were wrung together in front of him. Eddie was nine and a boy I watched during the day after his mother dropped him off at my house around seven every morning. He would go to the spare bedroom and go back to sleep on the sofa. I would later wake him and Brady for breakfast. His mother picked him up at five after her work. “Eddie, Eddie, the house is on fire!”
                  I think he said, “I know!” There was a freight train in the house, a noise so deafening that I couldn’t hear words. The fire was coming, fast it was coming, starving, it would eat