Heaven
We were in the middle of a neverending nosebleed. David’s little sharp head pointed at the kitchen ceiling; I pressed his nostrils with tissues, swiped away the bright blood as it slid out between my fingers. The trash can was a pile of red sodden wads. David was eight and I was thirteen. Our mother was working. Our father was dead.
I blamed the hot wind for David’s bleeding. Since early morning it had been howling, ungodly; when we woke up, our bedroom windows were hot to the touch. We had made a package of pizza bagels and watched the leaves strip off the mulberry tree in the yard. When the bleeding started, the tree was full. Now it was nearly bare.
I smelled the fire coming in the kitchen window. At first I thought someone was barbecuing. Then I saw the wall of fire eat the neighbor’s house.
We both froze, like animals. We saw the flames vault over the cinderblock wall at the edge of the yard. We saw the mulberry tree blaze. We heard the fire chuckling in the hedge outside and we shut our eyes.
It never came, though. The hedge acted as a firebreak, and in ten minutes the flames were dead outside our door. We had been clutching each other. My shirt was stained, but David’s nosebleed had stopped.
“What happened?” he asked me, and I knew it might be the last time it was my job to explain the world to him, and so I told him we were dead, and gone to heaven, and we spent the rest of the afternoon marveling at how beautiful all the mundane objects in our house were, the toaster and the trash can and the crumbs of the pizza bagels, now that we had all eternity to spend with them.