no, there was someone there. in the room with us. of course, it was ___. completely real -blahblah. My mother couldn't see her. Emily and I could. And at the end of the table was some guy, how old? maybe a teenager, no one I know, speaking German with loud pronouncements. I tried over and over to take his picture but he wasn't even visible in the viewfinder. So I tried again. What I saw, right before me, couldn't be proven, couldn't be captured.
And so, when the alarm from the kitchen woke me and began blaring through the house, when I opened my bedroom door and saw a white, moving cardboard bear on fire, in the center of my house I said, "I've got to pull it together." The alarm was so loud and there were little fires everywhere. A pillow here with blazes around its shape. There another figure, a person sitting, on fire, burning. My purse, at the bottom, alight and crackling. An art book ablaze.
My negligence had done this. I had left something turned on.
The alarm was deafening. Now everything I approached, crackled and promised to soon burst into flame.
