Free THE POWER OF THREE by Billie Sue Mosiman Page B

us…it was coming.
                  I saw the sliding windows across the room and the early morning sun beyond the panes.   They were positioned halfway up the wall and weren’t large, but they meant escape. I grabbed the closest thing to hand, a heavy empty champagne bottle I used for a flower vase. Taking it by the neck, I swung hard, and smashed the window, busting it like hell was riding on my shoulders. Glass splintered, sending shards flying and falling all around. I turned and took hold of Eddie. “You’re going out. Get away from the house.”
                  I saw sharp glass still sticking up from the sill and broke it out with my right hand, cutting a deep gash in my palm. I lifted Eddie and threw him out, heaving his weight up and over the window sill. I turned, the smoke now filling this room. I had to find Brady, my little boy, my lost little boy. If Eddie was all right, Brady had to be all right. He must be in his room, having run from the fire.
                  I raced out and down the hall to the door across from my bedroom. This was my son’s bedroom where the door stood open. No one was inside. I screamed “BRADY!”
                  He was nowhere, nowhere, nowhere . Not in his bed. Not standing there waiting for me as Eddie had been. Not in his closet.
                  He was gone, gone, gone. I went back down the hall, knowing there was just one place left to search before I had to get out of the fire. I already could hardly breathe the smoke boiled so thickly all around me. I threw open the bathroom door, but it was black in there, same as in the living room and kitchen, black as death, with flames licking orange and red and yellow up the walls. He couldn’t be in there or he was lost anyway. Where was he, my baby? God, why was this happening, why couldn’t I find him and get him out of here?
                  Yelling, screaming for him, I retreated to my bedroom again, got my window open and climbed up, still calling, hoping for a small voice to answer. I was crying hysterically, trying to find clean air to breathe. I tipped over the sill, falling to the ground outside with a hard thump that knocked the wind out of my lungs, leaving me in fetal-form, knees to chest, waiting an eternity for air so I could move, so I could run for help, so I could find someone to save my baby.
                  Across the street I flew, making for the home of my friends, the only ones who might be home and not at work on this bright, sunny week day in October. I got to the front door and lifted both my arms to bang the door and then I saw the horror of my condition, my skin falling off my arms in strips, blackened with soot. Does not matter , I thought, nothing matters. I hit the door with both damaged arms, fists balled, banging and screaming, “FIRE FIRE FIRE , help me!”
                  The door flashed open and the man stood there. He glanced quickly at me--burned, skin hanging, wild in my underwear, wild in my eyes, and then he looked across the street at the burning house. He was moving like thunder, like lightning, he was moving faster than any man ever moved, with me right behind him.
                  I heard sirens and knew someone had called the fire department. Sanchez hit my front door like a bulldozer. He put his shoulder into it and all his weight, but the door held, vacuumed closed by the sucking hot fire inside. He hit it again and again and suddenly the front plate glass picture window in the front of the house exploded, spewing glass all over the front lawn, scorching black clouds of smoke chasing it.
                  I can’t remember the sequence of events after that. An ambulance came and they had to physically force me onto a stretcher and tie me down. I saw my arms had clear plastic wrap around them, but I didn’t remember when that had been done or by whom. Later I discovered