House Fire

Excerpted from When Grief Calls Forth the Healing

“Let’s play with our dolls,” I say to Michael. “Where are their beds?”

Michael pulls them from the toy box under the window in our bedroom, and I pick up the falling mattresses and the little pillows. We search among the toys for the quilts.

I have a girl doll, and Michael, a boy doll. His has short pants, mine a skirt. The boy’s hair is blond, the girl has brown braids. Their hats are the same. Both dolls’ clothes are made of green and red plaid. Pat says they are Scotch. We’ve named them Mary and Michael. We play with the dolls a lot and put them to bed at night.

It’s wintertime and our room is cold. Pat has plugged in the space heater. It has coiled springs inside its bars that turn bright red. Nice warm air comes from the heater, and we stay close. Pat has told us never to get near the red coils behind the bars. She is in the next room, knitting in her chair, and we have decided to play “House Fire.”

“It’s nighttime,” says Michael. “The dolls should be in bed. Curtis told me house fires start at night. He read it in the newspaper.”

The dolls are under their quilts. I make Mary sit up.

“Michael, wake up,” I make her say. “It smells like smoke. Oh, dear, the house is on fire. Michael, Michael! Get up!”

Michael gets his doll out of bed, and we put both dolls against the heater bars with their hands raised up.

“Quick, quick,” Michael’s doll yells. “We must get out of the house before we burn up.” As we pull the dolls back from the heater we see their clothes are smoking and curling up black at the edges.

Pat steps through the doorway into our room. “What!” She turns away. In a minute she is back with a plastic tub full of water from the bathroom and pours it over the dolls’ heads.

We are taken to Mother and Father after supper—before bed.

The dolls will never be the same. Their faces are partly melted and their clothes are burned or smudged in black. Their hands are gone—they fell off. Mother says we can’t have new dolls because we were very bad. Now we play in Pat’s room. Our room is cold all the time. She took away the heater.