In Jack’s bedroom, as the smoke from outside clouded up outside his window, I soaked his bed in gasoline. I struck a match and held it aloft, remembering the smell of birthday cakes and romantic dinners, better times.

I thought of Rita, those first days together, the way she would light a campfire. For a moment, I wanted to see her. I squinted my eyes to see her, trying to will her into existence again, to say hello again, to see my Helen again—but the match burned my fingers and I dropped it, a reflex, and I watched it drop the same way I had watched Furley’s television fall, every second suspended.

The fire was instant and huge, its whooshing, scalloped beauty near incomprehensible. Stumbling backward, my face seared, I felt my way toward the living room couch and collapsed. I took a throw pillow into my arms and wept into its rough fabric, curling myself up into a fetal position, grateful to die inside my own womb.

The smoke was tremendous. It thickened until my surroundings were obscured and I was floating in a void. Heat was my whole body, the pain not registering at first, and when the first flame licked me I swear I felt cold, a white, brutal cold, like an ice cube on an unsuspecting neck.

Then a tugging. I was almost there, now. In the elapsing seconds that taffied into minutes, hours, I suppressed my panic and resisted running, embracing my doom instead. I tried to make myself breathe in the fumes to bring it faster, but my body resisted, and I settled for the choking cough, the manic thrashing my arms did, trying to clear the air in front of my face. I may have been hollering in outrage at the injustice of it, the end I was forced into; I may have been crying and gagging from the smoke and fear. But I definitely wanted to die.

The tugging on my arm continued, strengthened. Then my shoulders felt as if they were being lifted and shifted sideways, and I experienced a disorienting vertigo, as if my body was being moved or turned over without any reference point. “Rita,” I gasped, trying one last time to see her, or maybe the dumb dog, my roommates, anything to comfort me in this final, terrifying moment.

Something was coming closer, a demon, sprouting arms that began reaching for me, grabbing at me, pulling me. My body was being dragged down stairs, over burning macadam, crisped grass, the noise of fire roaring around me, orange and black boiling overhead like a living Halloween. The demon’s mouth was moving, and slowly I realized it was making sounds. It was willing me to live. Yelling it at me. Saying my name. And though I yowled and writhed in opposition, yanking myself away, kicking and slapping at its hands, it was unstoppable, a riptide that kept sucking me out to sea, trying to drown me with life. For a moment in the struggle I extracted myself and stood up, but a second after that I crumpled and fell face-first on the ground and began crawling back toward the heat, trying to get back to the fire, to find the steps up to 201, the place I belonged. But even this failed. I felt something tighten around my ankles and pull. And with my arms flailing, trying to grab hold of something, anything, the ground rushing away from me, shearing off the skin of my palms and my fingernails as they scrabbled for purchase, I was dragged by my feet, shrieking blood, out of the fire.