The Fire that Ruined My Life, For the Better?

I was just a normal girl, in a normal house, on a normal farm, in the middle of nowhere. But that day, that would all change forever.

I didn't know where or how the fire had started, I just knew that I had to get my family out of the burning, falling apart farmhouse. I was bounding down the stairs with my 8 year old brother clutched in my arms. Down two flights of stairs I went until I finally reached the bottom floor of my house. With smoke filling the air, I found the nearest window and dove through it.

Everything until three hours later was a blur, well mostly a blur except for a couple of vague details. All I remember after that is me seeing a guy in a black coat running away from the house, and me chasing after him till I eventually collapsed in the middle of the woods.

I woke up with a wet towel on my head and my mom talking to my dad.

¨Do you think she will be okay¨ my mom asks, heard in her voice that she was scared for my health.

"She'll be okay" My dad replied, but I could hear a tinge of worry in his voice as well. I sat up groggily, looking around to see my mom, dad, and brother that I had saved the life of earlier, all running to give me hugs and thanking me for saving their lives.

It felt great to be the hero, for two seconds. I saw that they were looking worriedly at something behind me. I looked back to follow their gaze and what I saw was absolutely horrifying. My house in flames, with a thick black trail of smoke like a funnel cloud leading up to the sky as if it were about to suck me into a giant storm of despair and hopelessness, looming over me and felt as if it weighed a hundred dreadful pounds. I felt angry, as though my head would explode, but also scared, so scared that I didn't want to continue. To continue trying to survive, it was easy back when we still had the farm, when everything came easy, but I started to believe that Mom was even more worried than I was. That looming look of horror looking as if it had been draped over her like this big shroud of worry just consuming her face.

The next few weeks were hard, as you would expect from a family so used to living on a farm that they all got up at six am in the morning to go collect eggs, which only made them all feel worse, because they could no longer do their regular routine. By that time, the fire had stopped, and we decided to go back to our burned house. Almost everything was left behind, and after a couple minutes of searching, I started to see no point in looking and kind of gave up. I just sat outside what were the perimeters of the house.

Up until Mom comes out and says "Quick, come look, you wouldn't believe what I found." But while I went to follow her, I noticed weird writings on the wall, things that look like engravings in the wall.

Did I see them while I was running out of the house yesterday I thought to myself, but I deemed it unimportant, and kept after my mother. By the time I got to where she was leading me (which is what used to be our cellar) the whole family was down there surrounding a safe. It was a decent size safe, about 4ft wide. I thought this odd because I had been down there and I was positive I had never seen a safe in that dark cellar. It possibly could have been put there after the fire, but I didn't think about that either.

There was a combination lock on the safe. We tried every combination we could think of including all of our birthdays. At that point we finally decided to just hit it with a hammer and see what happens. Although it didn't work the first time, after several hits with the old, rusty hammer, my dad cracked open the lock. We all stood in silence for a second until my brother broke it.

"So...........are we going to open it or what?" He asked innocently, looking at all of us for an answer.

He finally convinced dad to open up the chest. At first it was the the best thing ever. There were lots of water containers filled to the brim with dozens of decent sized bags filled with seeds. This set a happy feeling rushing through our family. We had feelings of hope and thoughts of being able to start over again overwhelmed the family with happiness. So much happiness that it almost softened the blow of what was lying under our bounty. A big, clunky analog clock with the date displaying November 15. We had lost all of our ways of keeping track of time in the fire and hadn't realized that winter was almost upon us.