My two sisters and I silently make our way out the door to the car. It is dark outside and the neighborhood is lined with silhouettes of California ranch homes. The streets are eerily empty with only streetlamps lighting our deserted way. I think to myself that at 2:30 a.m., this is usually the time when people at bars come stumbling home and but here we were heading out to eat. Only religion or alcohol would compel people to leave the house this late at night.

We are driving about six houses down from our home when my youngest sister exclaims from the backseat of the car: “Is that a real fire? Should we do something?” I look up and to my right. There’s an orange glow behind a fence, and as I look longer, a red blaze leaps up 10 feet high, silhouetted by the outline of white roof. The fire looks like it’s between two houses, or maybe it’s the backyard of another house. The fear makes us all wake up instantly.

My other sister backs the car so that we can get a better view. It looks like a fire that just started, but it was big and growing quick. There’s no way that flame was from a backyard barbecue. We can see now that we are looking at the back of a house on the other side of the block. I look around — there is not another car on the road, the lights on the houses are off, and no one is around. I jump out of the car as my youngest sister calls 911. I run up to the house with the American flag and bang on the metal door. “The house behind you is on fire!” I say to the man who opens the door. He is an older larger middle-aged white man. He says, that he just woke up and he knows and he disappears back in the house.

There are now a couple of other cars have stopped by ours and a few neighbors come out to the sidewalk to stand by us. A guy in a big red truck tells us that he had driven by the house on fire on the other side — the man had gotten out safely, but couldn’t ask much else since he spoke another language.

I go to the next house in the path of the embers and knock on the door — but they ignore my knocks. I know that they are in there because the window blinds are parted. My youngest sister goes back to the that house a few minutes later — she talks to a teenage Filipino girl who is taking care of her elderly grandparents. She listens to my sister. We see the granddaughter struggle in evacuating her grandparents — one of them needs a wheelchair — but they are moving too slowly. So my sister goes inside to help the Lola find her keys — she finds five sets of keychains and throws them all in the bag before helping the Lola out.

My sisters and I stand on the sidewalk as we watch the house go up in flames. It is clearer now that we are looking at the back of the house between two houses and behind a fence — and that a back bedroom was the origin of the fire. The fire moves like a slow creature across the house, it creeps into the attic and flames slowly lick out of the various windows. We gasp as fire bursts through cracks in the eaves of the roof. We clutch our hearts — it looks like the flames are alive.

The fire is deadly quiet.