“Bessie!”
“I’m right here.” She climbed back through the window. “We can make it down the stairs, but we’ve got to hurry. Fire is coming through the windows on every floor!”
Honoree’s lungs burned. Smoke seemed to be everywhere. She couldn’t breathe, but she couldn’t leave, not without saving more of her things, more of her memories.
“Whatever you are looking for,” Bessie shouted, “you best find it quickly. We need to leave.”
“Go on! I’m right behind you.”
Her mother’s quilt. Where was it?
Dropping to her knees, she crawled toward the cot. A loud crash and a burst of heat widened a crack in the wall, splitting the plaster into shreds.
“Come on!” Bessie screamed from the window.
Honoree found a piece of cloth. It had to be the quilt, but she couldn’t see—too much smoke.
She moved toward the window and grabbed what she hoped was the quilt. But just before she reached the windowsill, she picked up one of the heart-shaped sewing baskets. She vaulted through the window onto the rear porch.
Together, she and Bessie stumbled down the staircase, passing by the flames shooting from the windows. Her heart pounded. Too many memories, too much of the family that had died or abandoned her, memories she couldn’t watch burn.
Honoree moved toward the stairwell with Bessie grabbing at her. “Let go!” She pushed her aside and limped toward the stairs. The first step crumbled beneath her, and she lay in a pile of splintered wood.
A sharp blow to her hip and a searing pain exploded in her leg. The sob started deep inside her chest; the grief trapped in her throat by the trembling hand she held over her mouth.
The only home she knew was gone. The kitchenette where her father, mother, and baby sister—had lived, and died, and argued, and left—burned to the ground. Gone. The flat where she and Ezekiel had made love. The Singer sewing machine. Her dresses. Her lovely dresses. Those memories. Gone. Nothing left but bags of needles and thread, pieces of fabric, and lost dreams.
She lay on the ground, her legs useless, her heart broken, hugging her mother’s quilt to her breast. And she cried—the dull echo of her sobs eclipsed by the fire truck’s clanging bell. They had finally arrived to pour water on the ashes.
“Honoree!”
She wiped her eyes and tried to sit up.
Bessie lumbered toward her, a heavy weight in her arms, her face covered in soot and dirt. “I have it!”
Honoree choked on the words. “What do you have?”
“Your mother’s sewing machine. The Singer.”
* * *
“Honoree.”Ezekiel.
He was kneeling in the snow next to her. Where had he come from? Or was she dreaming?
“All gone.” The cold numbed her lips. “I don’t know what to do.”
“You are all right, Honoree.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I told you I’d come today.”
“Oh yes, Gallo.” She spoke the name without care, as a mountain of orange and red flames, painted on a midnight canvas, rose behind Ezekiel’s head.
On the sidewalk, in the snow, shivering with cold, blackened with soot, her neighbors sat motionless, exhausted by fear, fire, and loss. People Honoree had known for the past decade, tears streaming, mouths flopped open, eyes blankly staring, as their lives burned to the ground. Laura Lee and her five children huddled in silence on a steamer trunk. Kenny sat on the curb rifling through a camera case, a box of photos, and rolled-up canvases.
“Come home with me.” Ezekiel loomed next to her like a giant bird.
