Summary

Continuing to reflect, the narrator announces that she was seven years old when the family's house caught fire. She wonders how the fire had started, thinking that it was perhaps from old ash that rekindled in a cardboard box near the stove. Remembering the incident, she says that the babysitter had woken up and seen that the stairway to the narrator's room was on fire. She called 911 before running outside, leaving the seven-year-old narrator in her room upstairs. The narrator woke up, smelled smoke, and tested the door handle. It was hot, so she placed a rolled-up rug against the door. "I did not hide under my bed or crawl into my closet," she says. "I put on my flannel robe, and then I sat down to wait" (20).

Still recalling the incident, the narrator says that her mother and father returned to the...