(Yes, I joined another writing prompt community, here's the first of what will be at least 1/week.)
I remember the smell most of all, the smoke as it tore into lungs already strained from my failed efforts to save my daughter's life. I didn't really think about the danger of it at the time, maybe because I wanted so much to join them all in death. I didn't think about the pain a death by fire would bring, maybe because I couldn't believe anything could hurt worse then the pain I was already feeling.
Eventually the only light in the ruins of the apartment were the fires, small lights in the darkness of night. I remember laying next to the bodies of my family, the dust and smoke stealing my breath from me, and wondering how long it might be before I could once more be with them.
In the end the fire failed to claim me, rescuers working their way through the ruins of our lives found us, found me, and despite my protests they tore me away from my family. They couldn't know that it was death, not life, that I wanted in those moments. They couldn't know that I had been praying for the fire to take me to the place where my wife and children were waiting for me. They only knew that I was alive, I was a survivor amidst the destruction that had claimed the rest.
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