Janie and I were living at my parent’s house.  I saw my dad looking out the window with  a telescope and I asked what he was doing.  He pointed to a metal trash can on the curb that was glowing and he said he was looking to see if it was on fire.  I saw that there were flames shooting out of it and I ran towards the front door in a panic and asked if he had a fire extinguisher.  He said yes, pointed to the blazing trash can and then said it’s in there.  I ran outside to douse it with a hose, but that was when I noticed that the entire house was on fire.

I ran back inside to alert everyone, screaming FIRE FIRE FIRE, but no one seemed called to action, not even Janie who I found in our room, staring at the closet.  I tore the door open and started grabbing an armload of winter coats and told her to do the same.  JANIE, THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE!  YOU NEED TO GRAB AS MANY COATS AS YOU CAN AND THEN GET OUT OF HERE!  She didn’t help, but she did follow me out of the house.  When we got there, I realized my mom was still inside with my nephew.  I ran back in to get her and she was playing with him, singing and laughing.  I screamed, MOM THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE YOU NEED TO GET OUT.  She wasn’t paying attention.  I was telling her the house was going to collapse any minute and she needed to get out.  She turned to look at me and said, clearly irritated that I was interrupting her singing, “Fine.  We’re coming.”

At some point before the fire, my brother was with us.  He handed me the baby, which was apparently the first time I’d seen him.  He had only one eye.  I was very concerned, but my brother  just said, “I know it looks like he has only one eye, but the other one will open up on it’s own sometime.”  I was looking at the baby and his one eye  in the middle of his forehead and thinking to myself, Oh, man.  This baby is a Cyclops.  Why am I the only one who realizes that?  He’s going to have a very hard life. His glasses are going to look ridiculous.  He’ll probably have a monocle.  All of a sudden, the one eye shifted to the side and another one opened up.  HEY LOOK! I said, he has two eyes!

As we all sat outside on the lawn, watching the house as it smoldered, I realized that the fire had put itself out.  At no point were there ever any firemen.  No one in the neighborhood seemed at all concerned that the house had been on fire.  It looked like the furniture was still intact and in good shape, but the walls were gone, blackened and burnt.  We decided it would be unwise to stay and that we’d need to go elsewhere until  this could be cleaned up.  That’s when Wanda Sykes went back into the house to get some of her things.  Apparently she’d been living with all of us, too.  She needed a place to stay.  I told her she could stay with Janie and I, because we were going to stay at an apartment we’d been renting for the last 6 years.  An apartment we rented despite the fact that we lived with my parents.  We all got on a bus and were dropping people off to their new homes.  My parents were going to their second home, they said.  That’s when I realized that we were no longer paying for the apartment.  We’d forgotten that we stopped renting it because paying $800 a month for an apartment we didn’t use was pretty silly and, besides, we couldn’t afford it because we had been paying my parents $3000 a month in rent.  I asked if we could all stay at my parents second house and they seemed pretty burdened by the request.  I said, hey, you have like 5 beds there.  We just need one and Wanda can sleep on the floor.  They finally agreed.