It’s working.
Not long now.
A little financial freedom would set me free from my own mind. In difficult times when I’m counting up the cents, I think back to six months of prosperity. I didn’t think once about financeswhen I was with Caleb. Granted, I wasn’t a mother back then, but he brought a certain vibrancy to Maple Crossing that made me look at the place different.
The smoke thickens. Dangerous, black plumes cloud into the air and distort my vision. I step back an inch, to the other side of the kitchen where the smoke hasn’t yet drifted. But then I accidentally inhale some and explode into a coughing fit.
Sweat dripping down the back of my shirt, I shed a layer and try to remember why the fuck I’m purposely choosing to set fire to my stove…
Or my entire kitchen.
The leftover sunflower oil dances around in the pan without a care in the world, meanwhile I’m spiraling about my decision to take advice from a shady insurance fraud “consultant” who deleted all traces of our conversation as soon as the chat ended.
Shit. The facts were there and everything sounded pretty damn promising, but I don’t know the first thing about fires.
Sure, I might’ve unofficially dated a fireman for a few months, but that doesn’t make me an expert in the field.
My breathing turns shallow. It’s hard to regulate. Breath work usually helps me to stop acting like a hot mess, but I realize now that I’m short of breath, not because I’m anxious…
But because chemically induced smoke from the nonstick pan is skirting around the ceiling, out into the living area where I now find myself.
“Shit,” I cuss under my breath.
And that’s when the screeching smoke alarm awakens.
An intermittent shrilling noise plays repeatedly, bringing a very confused and half-asleep Sonny out into the room.
“Baby!” I rush over into the corridor and scoop him up instantly. Keeping my voice level so he doesn’t freak out, I softly say, “Wait outside a minute for me, buddy, so I can get this mess under control.”
“What happened?” he questions, rubbing sleep from his eyes as I carry him out into the backyard.
“I made a small, very fixable mistake.” I set him down in the yard and tell him to stay put for a moment. “I’ll be right back.”
I close the door and rush back into the kitchen, diving under rings of smoke to turn off the stove. I next remove the pan, but drop it in reaction to the excruciating pain that explodes up my arm from the spitting sunflower oil.
“Shit!” I hiss as the pan crashes to the floor.
And that’s when the real fun begins.
A white-orange flash tears across the kitchen floor with a life-threateningfwump.I gasp, choke on both shock and smoke, and salvage an escape while I still have time. In a hurry to get the fuck out as quickly as possible, I accidently barrel straight into all the mortgage documents and mess, sending all of it crashing to the floor.
The starved flames eat up the mess and start searching around my kitchen for more.
Wooden drawers. The pantry.
Flames elongate as I whip past them. I leap over the wall of orange just in time as they stretch and bend to wolf down more documentation left on another kitchen countertop.
There’s no end to all of this coughing. All of my energy is going toward getting the smoke out of my lungs, but more slips in as soon as I think I can breathe again.
Heat from the fire burns my skin a fuck ton more than the sunflower oil did. It’s like I’ve stepped into an oven—a six-hundred-degree oven that’s on a mission to burn me to a crisp as fast as possible.
Flames multiply.
I throw myself into the corridor and army-crawl the rest of the way out into the backyard. Sonny is out there screaming for me, but the smoke in my lungs prevents me from even being able to reassure him that things are…
Not okay.
Did I just burn down our home to illegally claim insurance fraud?
