As the floor connects with the rear of her head, something fiery streaks through the doorway and into the room, screaming, hitting the far wall, leaping, turning, trying to escape the flames that swarm it. She doesn’t know which of the cats it is, but she covers her ears, trying to blot out its torment until it falls silent.

A thick black fog now covers the ceiling, like a roiling sky above her. Her eyes sting, and she coughs so hard she sees dark constellations.

Out, she says. Get out.

She rolls onto her stomach. She knows the stairs are aflame and offer no escape, that the landing will soon be engulfed. The heat is already unbearable. The window above the dresser: she gets her knees beneath her and crawls towards it, gasping and coughing. Items scatter from the surface of the dresser as she pulls herself upright. A hairbrush, a Bible, a perfume bottle that has been empty for decades. She reaches for the sash window, tries to pull it up and open. It will not move, and she cries out in anger and sorrow, knowing that she will die here.

No, she will not. Not now, not like this. Not after everything she’s lived through. Not while the children still need her.

Oh, the children.

Are they burning with the wood and floors and walls? She can’t hear them, only the cats trapped downstairs. But the children never speak, never make a sound, even when she was a girl, playing with them in the shaded corners of the secret room below the house. They were always silent. But will they burn?

She pulls at the window once more, and this time it moves, if only an inch or two. Enough to get her fingers underneath, to haul upwards with what little strength she has. She tastes the air from outside, clean, so clean. Up onto the top of the dresser, her head and shoulders out and through, and she sees the drop. How far to the ground? She can’t tell. It might kill her. Better than burning. Anything is better than that.

Then she’s falling.

She is not conscious of climbing through the window, of hanging by her hands from the frame, or the decision to let herself drop. First she is there, dangling by her fingertips, looking down at the ground, the overgrown bushes below the window, the past autumn’s leaves, old gravel. Then the ground is rushing up to her and she cries out.