FIRE ON THE HOME FRONT

Waking up out of a perfectly blissful REM cycle, I could have sworn I heard the elevator shaft in my building collapsing with huge metal “bangs”. When the noises continued my feeling of being annoyed quickly turned to utter fear after I began to smell burnt plastic. I whispered “Paigeeee!! PAIGEEE, wake up”! She rolled over, “what’s that smell?” she said. I was in complete shock of Paige’s rock like sleep; how could she not wake up to all the noise? All of a sudden the hallway light flicked on and Miguel came out of his room dressed in daytime clothes. He shut the door. “WHAT THE F*** IS GOING ON!” I honestly thought Miguel was trying to kill us or something, lock us in the room for dead. As the smell was becoming more and more potent by the minute so was my worrying instinct. Paige and I crept out of the door into the hall way were saw Pepita sitting at the edge of her bed trying to wake herself up. “Vamose?” I asked as I wondered why everyone was being so relaxed about the burning smell and the loud noises. Paige and I went back into the room where I told her “Put some clothes on! We’re getting out of here.” By the time we re-entered the hallway thick black smoke FILLED the apartment and we were flabbergasted to see Pepita bent over in the hallway outside of the bathroom hocking up a lung with her PJ pants around her ankles and her booty in the air. It wasn’t long before the burnt plastic smoke infested our lungs. Paige and I tried to hurry Pepita out of the house. Miguel was nowhere to be found. He left us to die. I ran to the door and peeped through the peephole, I didn’t see any smoke so I felt the door with the back of my hand. The coast was clear. As Paige and I ran out of the house the phone rang and Pepita answered it in the midst of us all having temporary lung failure. Paige and I decided to save our selves so we jetted. Out side there was an Asian man passed out on the curb in front of the market below our apartment. Posted up on a curb down the road, Paige and I heard sirens roaring down the street and that is when desert arrived. In Spain there must be some sort of requirement that if you want to be a cop you must be a former model because they are all SO attractive. In Spanish the word for “fireman” is “bombero”, therefore, when the firemen began flooding the street I thought it was the bomb squad. I quickly learned this was not the case. After about two hours of watching smoke barrel into our apartment and the bombero’s trying to put the fire out Pepita and Miguel brought us to their daughter Marise’s house which was conveniently across the street.  Needless to say our clothes wreaked like burnt plastic for weeks, our house had to be professionally cleaned and repainted. This experience brought Paige and I so much closer to our host parents in the last four weeks of our home stay. While it was a chaotic experience in the end it made for a much more happy family.