Standing at my sink washing the dishes, I watched my siblings make dinner. We wanted to make tonight as special as possible, but we had no idea how to prepare the food.
“Okay,” my older brother Ivan said. “The box says to set it to 350° for the bread and 9 for the noodles…so what should I do?”
I walked over to the stove and took the manual out of his hand. Opening it up completely, I set it on the length of the stove. Staring at the jumbled instructions in confusion, I came up with an idea. “Hey! How about we do this…” I reached over and turned all of the smaller nozzles to 9. Then I turned the bigger one in the middle to 350°. “There,” I said. “All fixed!”
We had no idea what we were doing but we felt pretty good after that. As I turned back to the sink to finish cleaning my mom’s favorite china dishes, I hear, “Uh I don’t think it’s going to work…” I turn around and see them with sauce all over them: the sauce had exploded on them! I was about to laugh at my sister who had noodles in her hair when, out of nowhere, the stove burst into flames. We jumped back, afraid that we too would burn. I frantically looked around me, trying to find something that would dose the fire.
I remembered that I was standing near the sink, so I reached over to the sprayer, unaware that I had pressed the handle down already, and turned the water on full blast. I spun back toward the flames when I heard Crystal scream. I was spraying her in the face with the water on full blast! I turned back to the sink and realized that it was also on ‘hot’. I hurried to turn the ‘hot’ handle off but as I twisted it with all my might, it broke clean off of the sink. I dropped the sprayer to the kitchen floor, causing the water to stop flowing through the nozzle, but instead into the sink which was still plugged up from me washing dishes. Reaching down to unplug the sink, I pulled back immediately. It was scorching hot and the handle was broken, what was I going to do!

I turned my attention back to the fire. Crystal was fanning the fire with a broom as Ivan was waving his shirt and blowing at the flames. But for some reason these items were not assisting us. It seemed as if the flames were growing higher and hotter. Thinking that I was just imagining it, I started to throw my schoolbooks at the fire. I hate my schoolbooks so much, I thought, maybe the flames will too!
We continued to fan, blow, and throw things at the flames, as the burning water started to seep its way over the counter and to the floor, causing the room to grow even hotter from the rising steam. But the flames just seemed to keep climbing the walls around us, enclosing us in the small kitchen.
So distracted by the flames, we failed to hear the car door outside. We all turned around simultaneously when we heard a shriek from the front of the house. Our mother stood in the entryway of our little home, a look of terror on her face, which reflected the orange hue of the flames. We dropped our tools, which had seemed to be no help at all, and I said, “Um Happy Mother’s Day, Mom…”