Some must know information first: we dont have electric heat. Dad always said its too expensive. All we have to heat a whole house, is a tiled stove. Sometimes, when its low pressure outside, we get a bunch of smoke inside the house. Nothing unusal, but yesterday…

…by a hair’s breadth, we could have lost it all. And this is, how it all began…

It was evening, my brother was at work, I was in my room and read before I had planned to head over to a friends flat to watch our Pop Idol together. I was already late, but I wanted to finish another chapter. I knew my Dad had started a fire. There was some smoke, but nothing out of the usual. At some point, I got up to check on what my Dad was doing.

To my left, I saw my Dad sleeping on the couch, as he always does, on my right I saw the stove. What none of us had noticed was, that there was lots and lots of stuff put on the stove. We always put newspapers, catalogues and such on it, again, nothing unusual, but during summer, with my brother and me being so preoccupied with ourselves, we just put things on there, and a huge pile of paper had accumulated.

I went to the stove to check, digged a bit under the paper, and saw, that under all the masses of paper, was a piece of wood from last year, laid on there to dry, which we had totally forgotten about. And guess, that wood had caught fire.

I yelled for my Dad, and I started to throw all the magazines and what do I know, that hadnt caught fire yet, over to my Dad. Some were still wrapped in plastic, thats why the fire was still under some control. But as soon as I had started to put things away, there were flames, lots and lots of flames.

Another thing we do is, we put wet clothes on a dryer, and we put that dryer on the stove, so the clothes can dry. There wasnt much on it, but the Tshirt hanging there, caught fire immediatly. That was the point where we stood there and thought, that is it, we are burning down.

Nothing can do that moment justice. NOTHING. Writing it out, it sounds so “little”. Telling it to my brother, again, nothing too bad. But it was bad. It was bad, scary, and I felt so out of control.

I knew it was I who had to deal with this. And I had a billion things racing through my head. One thing was what a professor at Uni told us, that most people die in dangerous situations, because they get panic, and do the wrong thing. What is it, 90%?

I decided, to let the flames do their thing, and wait until it is again managable. Because at that point, it was out of control. I could only decide to do this, as the whole situation was still ON the stove. Nothing around it had caught fire yet. Thats what I did, and it took almost an hour until I managed to stop the fire.

There was smoke everywhere. Thick smoke, you were barely able to see. The worst smoke was, when I tried to suffocate the fire. I put wet things on it, those things dried up fast, and caught fire too. You werent even able to breath. To this minute, I still feel the taste of smut down my throat and up my nose, its disgusting.

It doesnt do good to do the WHAT IF. But yesterday, when this all happened, I was not supposed to be home. If I had went over to my friend in time, the whole house would have burned down, with my Dad sleeping on the couch. The doggie slept too by the way, and didnt even get up, when the fire was out of control.

As always, click thumb for full size and caption!