subscriptorium

[subscriptorium]

Homage to “A Butterfly on F Street”

from Lost in the City 

Hannah Calistri

Advanced Fiction Workshop

Prof. Lieu 

11 April 2021

It was bad luck that Margaret Rose also worked at the Cook Shop, and even worse that Joy had just got her license and was demoted to delivery duty. Now Margaret stood behind the counter batting her lash extensions at every customer, and fluttering them like frantic insect wings if that customer happened to be a boy from East Mill High. Now that field hockey season was over their opposing shifts had collided, and Joy had to swallow the sourness that Margaret Rose brought out of her. 

“I heard she’s blown every soccer player from West,” Kayla told the lunch table that fall day, when Margaret Rose first appeared in the cafeteria. She was the talk of the semester, never Margaret, never Rose, since neither name could capture the scale of the new girl’s impact on the school. She inspired hatred in girls she’d never even spoken to, and inspired sharpie scrawled lists on the walls of the boy’s bathroom, all having to do with sex, and all having Margaret Rose in the number one spot. 

Now the store front was closing and the boss had just given Joy a list of deliveries, all in West Mill. Joy didn’t know a single street name on the list. 

“Margaret Rose can show you the directions--Margaret!” the boss called across the deli counter to the front register, where Margaret Rose was just taking off her apron. 

“Come help Joy with these deliveries!” 

It was an unlucky coincidence that the last time Joy had driven to West Mill, Margaret Rose had also been in the car. It was after a bonfire by the River, one that ended in police sirens, that Joy found herself with Margaret Rose passed out on the lap of Carter Mcintosh in her back seat. Carter had been Joy’s chemistry partner, bandmate (they both played the trumpet), and teen boy fantasy until the moment she saw him arm and arm with the sophomore, kissing her with his pursed, trumpet blowing lips. 

“Turn right down here, then we just go straight for awhile.” 

Margaret Rose said quietly, with her hands clasped around the strap of the seat belt. Joy had turned the radio on the moment the car started, so at least the silence could be filled and the time could pass smoothly. Joy made no acknowledgement of Margaret Rose’s voice besides turning on the blinker and looking intently at the pedestrians crossing the street. 

“You have a really nice car,” Margaret Rose spoke again. Joy wondered if she remembered that she had been in it before, and that Joy could’ve left her foolish, drunken ass for the police, but didn’t. 

“Was it hard, passing your driver’s test?” 

“Nope,” Joy said curtly. 

“Well you seem like a good driver, most of the upperclassmen I ride with drive like maniacs.” 

“Like who?” Joy asked, unable to resist a bit of gossip. 

“Like Vanessa, or, don’t tell anyone I told you this, but Carter. He is the worst. One time he was speeding down Greenwood, you know it’s so narrow, and he hit someone’s side window clean off!” 

Margaret Rose slapped her hand for emphasis, and Joy huffed just a little bit, imagining Carter fumbling behind the wheel of his Jeep. 

“So you and Carter,” Joy started, again, unable to resist. 

Margaret Rose looked at Joy then back out the passenger side window, still holding onto her seat belt strap. 

“Everyone always asks me about it,” Margaret Rose said after a moment, “like I’m the one who got him drunk and took him home.” 

“Oh,” Joy said, running through her memories of that week after the bonfire with a furrowed brow. It seemed like international news, that Carter had taken Margaret Rose’s virginity. 

“I thought you two were a thing,” Joy asked.

Margaret Rose was quiet, her lash extensions quivering. She pointed down the driveway of their first delivery.

“I thought so too,” Margaret Rose said. She finally undid her seat belt and took the delivery to the front door, leaving Joy alone in the car, listening to the wind as she checked her reflection in the sideview mirror.

[subscriptorium]

Homage to Lost in the City

Hannah Calistri

Advanced Fiction Workshop

Jocelyn Lieu

5 April 2021

Homage to “Lost in the City, The Night Rhonda Ferguson was killed.”

Faith decided on Wawa, the extra large water was free and she liked to chew on the orange straws. Plus, the black and milds were sold like Slim Jims. She turned down the stereo of Laura’s Chevy as if that settled it. Grace, buckled tight in the backseat, had wanted Wendy’s, and Meg wanted to go to Dollar Tree for entertainment and a wine opener. The girls decided on real wine instead of the kind from a box, but the bottles were so nice they weren’t even twist off. Laura parked the car directly in front of the Wawa sign, it’s yellow and orange sunset calling in the passing traffic. Meg continued singing even after the stereo was off.

Sex with me so amazinggg, always on work no vacaytio-on.

“Oh is it really?” Faith jeered back at her.

“Cuz I’m pretty sure Nick would say otherwise.”

“Oh suck a dick, Faith,” Meg said, with emphasis on dick. She opened and closed the door so fast Laura was sure their hostilities would be over and done with just as quick. Laura actually liked carting the girls around, even if it meant driving from the suburbs to East Falls in the dark of rush hour. The car had become their supreme freedom, the panacea to high school monotony and the tornado that took them to Oz. Grace was the last one to get out and the only one who didn’t have cotton mouth from the bowl they had just smoked.

“Maybe we can go to Wendy’s later, after the party,” Laura told her at the soda fountain. Meg and Faith were at the kiosk trying to decide weather they wanted their own mac ‘n cheese or to split.

“Drive thru closes at 11,” Grace said, scratching her elbows through her sweatshirt. It had her name plastered on the back, swimming and diving on the front. Laura preferred to look like she wasn’t in high school when she was off the premises. Though it was probably pretty evident from they way the girls were monopolizing the store with their laughter and slurping their straws of free water.

Grace settled on cheese puffs and red bull while Faith propped herself up on the counter with her big doe eyes, asking for a black and mild. The cashier was flustered, and Faith made sure to suck extra slow on her straw as she looked at him. Beside her, Meg and Laura were cackling like hyenas.

“Wh-what flavor?” The cashier asked.

“The only flavor,” Faith sassed, “white wine.”

“Can we get red too--” Meg started but Faith gave her the hand.

The girls ran back to the Chevy with their spoils, feeling reckless as thieves. Laura knew that the more innocent they looked, the more wild they felt. You had to be 18 to buy nicotine but they always got by with Faith. She was a real woman, while the rest of them were just fumbling to be. Back on the road, Laura turned onto Bell’s Mill, taking the windy, forest way to Ridge Pike, then towards the city again on Henry Avenue. Wind and Rihanna and smoke blew through the car.

Meg returned to her singing and Grace joined in, finally getting in the spirit. Laura loved the bends of the road, and the mature feeling of one hand on the wheel and the other on the black and mild.

She passed it back to Meg, who passed it up to Faith, who stuck her head out the window to wave at the soccer boys driving beside them. Laura pulled the Chevy off of the main drag and down Hermit Lane. It looked like nothing, a trail head into darkness, the overgrown weed that was Fairmount Park. But there were a dozen other cars parked on the little lane, a sure sign that there was something wild lurking beyond the treeline.

“Not a sip, Laura,” Grace hissed, a stern contrast to Meg and Faith’s merry dance into the forest. The soccer boys waved to them from down the trail with their flashlight. Faith waved her handful of wine in response.

“Whatever,” Laura rolled her eyes.

“You should DD then if yer gonna be such a narc.”

[subscriptorium]

Walk around

Hannah Calistri

Advanced Fiction Workshop

Prof. Lieu

March 24 2021

Victory: packing two pens instead of one 

I like the East Village because the people rise with the sun, and I like watching things begin. I like beginning. Half-lucid on 7th street knowing there will be coffee and the first taste will be the best. At this point the day is a promise. It’s like a blue mollusk shell, both ancient and new. Perhaps I can open it and find a pearl. Perhaps it won’t open for me at all. 

These days have been closed shells for sure. All I have is string around my neck and a thin, naked collarbone. 

East River Park is overgrown with activity. It is not usually a place for pensive sitting, it is a place for movement. Leggings and swishing ponytails and panting. Everyone is running or near close to it. Normally, I come here to shed a pensive mood. Like brooding can be undressed, out run. I feed on sweaty frenetic energy-- and all that fury, all that doubt, it goes quiet. I know I can't out run it. I can do it for 5 miles, but it always comes back eventually. 

So now I take that mood-- closed shell kept shell buried shell dead shell never had a pearl never had a dream never was anything but calcium carbonate and evolutionary luck--- and I sit with it, I let it ring it’s wailing bells, my body its belfry. Maybe, like an infant, it will just wear itself out if nothing comes to its consolation. 

Brooklyn looks so blue across the river. It reminds me of that painting technique for creating perspective. Show the foreground clear and vibrant and the background fuzzy and blue. Blue means distance. It means light particles fusing so busy between me and that building so many particles beating in the air the only frequency is blue. Funny how it's the fastest waves that cast such softness. Blue means distance. Where is the foreground, clear and vibrant? Where is the closeness? Blue means distance. I must be far away then, I can barely discern my life from that hectic clear sky fuzz. 

[subscriptorium]

Homage to “The President’s Wife has a Dream” from Dogeaters

Hannah Calistri 

Advanced Fiction Workshop 

Prof Lieu 

15 March 2021 

*I decided to explore the central character of a larger piece and world I am working on in the YA fantasy genre!* 

* The character is referred to as both Wallow (name from birth) and Keep (a nickname because of her job as an Innkeeper). I wanted to explore different naming practices, and thought it would be interesting to name characters based on emotions/states/quality--- like Wallow, Giddy, Earnest, etc. *

Lake Longing was silent, there were no boats, and no waves or winds to suggest there ever were. There was only Wallow and the mist rising white from the lake’s surface. It was glassy. The mist hung low and thick. Wallow was standing on the mound, the rock pile at the center of the lake. The mist should’ve been rising but it was still. Everything was still, even the water around Wallow’s ankles. There were no ripples. She had to go down, down, down. Wallow stepped once down the rocks. She stepped again, her body deepening, without sensation. Then she plummeted

Wallow could see clearly, brightly, the green arms of the lakeweeds. The fish were teeming, the mollusks flapped around her, happy to be plucked. It was the high-season and the surface waved above, buoying the boats. They were bellies, slow moving beasts of unknown origin. Wallow was formless, like the water, she was so happy. There was no body, no Wallow, no Keep. She was euphoric

Something fell. Wallow was in the silt, buried like a clam. It was a body, the body of a woman sinking from above. Wallow watched. When she breathed, she breathed. She was breathing in the water. She watched the body fall limp down down through the lakeweeds. How could Wallow breathe? The body was naked, unmoving. It’s hair billowed, too white. Green through the water, and tan skin, splotchy with white, pie-bald. She was sinking, she was going to sink into the silt, into Wallow’s clam bed. Wallow tried to speak, to call out, but she had no voice. She was a clam in the silt. Bubbles rose from her shell, they floated to the splotchy woman body above. The woman turned and turned in a slow fall. Her eyes were closed, her mouth was open. She had a face but it was empty, a familiar face, Wallow’s face. It was Wallow, sinking Wallow

No. Wallow is dreaming, she is not a mollusk, she is Keep. The Inn is teeming with sailors and Longing Town’s finest, drunk and playing bets and dressed in leather. Keep is behind the bar, serving Earnest a stein, his face beaming, his sleeve rolled up, “I miss you,” Keep says, “I was having a nightmare,” Earnest is so close to her she can smell his mead breath, she can smell bergamot and smoke and something rotting, “The world’s a nightmare,” he says, it comes out in a song, “The world’s a nightmare,” the tavernfolk join in chorus, Keep laughs but there is no sound 

The tavernfolk turn towards her silence, Keep doesn’t know them, she is afraid, she is the girl Wallow from the mountains, they are mystic living statues, she falls to her knees and asks for her mother, they ignore her, they wear robes of grey they have white hair like Wallow and bright eyes like Earnest Earnest who has disappeared Earnest who is now Might his fur growing with flowers and Wallow plucks them while the grey monks chant and chant and they all have Earnest’s face and they all had Giddy’s face and they all have the same moving mouth but there is no sound it is all from Might his great beast bellowing the chant while the ark flowers grow blue and the air grows bright and the chant grows longer and lower and it is bells in the morning and it is ship masts in the wind and it is light light light from the core a guttural moan the Tavern is gone and Might is gone there is only voice and light chanting over and over “Keeeep, Keeeep, Keeeep.” 

[subscriptorium]

Homage to Eady

Hannah Calistri

Prof. Lieu 

Advanced Fiction Workshop 

March 4 2021 

I’ve never seen a slow death, at least not in someone I knew. I’ve never seen it’s shadow either, reflected in the eyes of those who have to watch. I am not sure what’s harder-- watching Grandpa die or watching my Mom watch Grandpa die. 

He’s turning into a zombie. 

My Mom laughs, but her eyes are wide. She’s looking elsewhere, into the future of her fear. It makes my stomach curl. She waves her stiff arms up and down like grandpa does when he’s sleeping, mouth agape. He’s reaching for something, for someone. Perhaps he’s trying to speak. 

We could only fly out to Michigan for a long weekend. We visit the nursing home everyday. It’s called a cottage but it is too sterile to invoke comfort, or the sense of a vacation. There is a key code to get in and out, like a prison. Once you’re interred, there is only one way out. 

The old folks in there know it, I think, even though they’re minds are gone. One man has screaming fits while another lady, always in yellow, sobs with the regularity of tropical rains. The nurses always leave her with a box of tissues. It looks like even she doesn’t know why she’s crying. My grandpa insists he’s late to a meeting, he’s missed a flight. He’s got to get out of the cottage as soon as possible. The nurses have to wrestle him and he always fights back. 

We’re lucky we don’t have to see those things. We only hear about it second hand. When my mom and I come in he is sleeping by the gas fire beneath a blanket, mouth open. His skin is peeling away in petals of violet. We wrap him in bandages so he can’t pick himself away. 

Grandpa, it’s Rona and Hannah. 

My Mom introduces us. She is already crying. 

It is easier for me. I have always known him as an old man. I can play along with the scene he creates. He asks for his briefcase so he can draw out some sketches. He used to be an engineer. I wheel him around the room and take him wherever he wants to go. He points to strange things-- a binder, a cabinet, a paper brochure. He is adamant about his choices, his wants, and then when they're in his hands, he asks me-- how did these get here? 

Mom and I sit at the table while he draws. His hands shake. He doesn’t even feed himself anymore, but still there is an image in his mind he wants to get out. His whole life is being shook like a drink in a tumbler or sand in an hourglass, and the moments, all mixed up, appear in his mind's eye at random. First he’s sailing. Then he’s chasing the kids. Then he’s at a business meeting. Now he’s in the factory, building his famous doors. Life is ending and it’s happening again and again. 

We watch him clutch the pencil desperately. His fingers are as speckled as they are insubstantial. We cling desperately too, to his words, his movements, searching for a message in the rubble of his body. But it is just indeterminate lines and scribbles. He puts down his pencil and looks at the page. 

What the hell is this? 

Grandpa looks at us and we laugh. He laughs too in his old man way, mouth open, in a huff and a puff. It’s a relief. He is aware, I think, that his faculties are failing. And he’s always been the type of man to laugh at himself. 

Four days is not enough. Grandma feigns a heart attack in hopes that we will stay, but we can’t. Grandpa tells me he is proud of me, and that I should buy myself a dancing dress. And of course, he tells me to take care of my Mom. We tell him we will see him soon, but he doesn’t reciprocate. I think he knows that this goodbye is the last. 

In the shadow of my Mother’s eye, I watch him go. But the shadow doesn’t leave. It’s devastation and it’s destiny. And I think I’ll always be watching it-- my Mother watching her father die. 

I think I know what is harder now. 

[subscriptorium]

Homage to “Dogeaters” by Hagedorn

Hannah Calistri

Prof. Lieu 

Advanced Fiction Workshop 

28 February 2021

*Going to try and write about my family dinner in Hagedorn’s style. Not sure I captured her richness, it is hard to emulate, but I tried my best to create a larger scene and cast of characters within a small one. I was thinking a lot about how Hagedorn uses food and dining to unify or separate families, race/ethnicities, and class boundaries. I was thinking more about unity in this exercise-- but I do love the literary and cultural value of food in the novel, and how food and family/history are closely tied as well.*

Like most of the homes in Chestnut Hill, our house on Ardmore was made of stone, and it was ancient. It was old enough to have a dim, pantry staircase, and I was not yet old enough to sit at the dining room table. I scuttled down the narrow stairs that descended rather magically from my bedroom and down their red paint. A rather sinister color, but I found it comforting as I went down the stairs to where we kept the trash and the fax machine and the bags of brown rice. We called it the backstairs. Any visitor to our house was perplexed by the idea-- a front and back staircase. An outsider’s confusion only added to the magic. Our magic. No one else had a house like ours, with the skeleton of a wrought iron gate in the garden, a labyrinthine basement where guard dogs once prowled, and a dwarf sized door at the center of the attic. There was a story to this house just trying to reach us, I was sure. It was aching through the wood beams, seeping down the bathroom tiles like steam. It was my nightmare and my fantasy. Especially on the backstairs, I felt like it was my history to untangle, my destiny to be a part of. Perhaps it was older than the colonizers and their ruined mills down by the creek. Perhaps it was older than the Quakers and the aristocracy of Philadelphia, that built our neighborhood for the purpose of repose, a breath of fresh air from the city. The Ardmore house was trying to speak to me. Someone was calling my name. 

Hannah!  It was a familiar voice. It was dinner time.  I knew we must’ve been cooking pasta alfredo because the greasy smell of bacon was making me giddy, and the reason for my running down the stairs. That, along with the clambering sounds of my siblings in the kitchen, bothering Chris. I used two hands to open the pantry door and saw Chris, who I adored, standing over the sink with her head in a tunnel of steam. An italian facial, we called it, though it was about as Italian as putting bacon in pasta alfredo. Which is to say, untraditionally Italian. Chris, also known as Chrissy, or Mommy, or Mommy Dearest, which really made her mad, was married to my Dad, and therefore not really Italian at all. 

“That’s too big,” Chrissy said to Hadley, though she still had her head in the fettucini. Chris was a nurse, daughter of a doctor, middle child in litter of seven. Just like the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where she worked, she was caring, and crucial, and had a very standardized way of doing things-- including how to cut bacon into bits. Hadley, the oldest of Chris’ kids, was either two of me or I was only half of her. Where Chris had a stream of wispy blonde hair, Hadley had a mane. It poured down her back in waterfall waves. She was at the counter cutting the bacon with a pair of scissors, and I was standing barely taller than her hips, like a little beggar shadow. 

“I like the big chunks,” Hadley complained, popping a piece into her mouth. Chris sighed, and heaved the strainer full of pasta back into the pot. I waited for her to scold Hadley, but she didn’t see. 

Cooper bolted through the swinging door, as unexpected as her own red hair. She was a mystery in and of herself, no one knew where the red hair came from. Perhaps a distant great-aunt who may have been auburn, and a few cooper flecks in her father’s beard. Her father who was not my father. My Dad didn’t have a beard. Hadley and Cooper were my sisters nonetheless. And Chris was my Chris. 

“Great, now you two can set the table.” 

It was a younger sister job, one that I always mixed up even though it should’ve been simple. Why a knife on the left and a fork on the right? Who really cares about the placement of a spoon? 

Cooper went straight for the bacon bits, ever devious and too quick to get her hand slapped away. 

“Hey! Don’t eat that!” Though Hadley could probably still taste the bacon in her teeth. 

“Cooper, you know better.” Chris was pouring the creamy sauce into the pot, and she was also pulling the broccoli out of the oven, and she was also reaching for the plate of perfectly cut bacon bits. 

“But you had some too,” I chimed in without thinking, mostly because I felt left out. I didn’t get to steal any bacon. 

“Hannuh,” Hadley frowned down at me. I was already retreating towards the backstairs. 

“Don’t be such a tattle-tale!” 

I returned her frown as I picked up the phone book from the pantry shelf, the bottom of the backstairs. I teetered under its weight, feeling the slippery floor under my feet. You always knew it was summer when you could see your sweaty footprints in the orange tile. I always liked that feeling. 

I kept teetering through the mess of my sisters legs and Chris’s elbows and the opening and closing of shelves and drawers. I pushed through the swinging door and teetered to my assigned seat, where I plopped the phonebook on my chair, like a booster. I would probably need another one. I still wasn’t big enough to sit at the dining room table. 

[subscriptorium]

Homage to “Kassandra and the Wolf”

Hannah Calistri

Prof. Lieu 

Advanced Fiction Workshop

17 February 2021

Under the shaded tree, I pushed Gilly’s head to one side so it drooped, just like the willow. I wanted to see the cords in her neck pulled tight. I had tied back her hair like Ma did-- she always said we had bird’s nests instead of curls. Ma also said that Gilly was a doll, which is why I got to do whatever I wanted to her. She liked it because I let her smush bugs and play fairies and I only sometimes made her cry. Now, I got to trace the long cord in her neck like a fiddle string for plucking. Gilly giggled with her front teeth biting her lip. 

Are you ready? I asked, leaning forward on my knees. 

Gilly nodded and blushed and giggled as I came down on her neck flesh, wet and hungry. 

Ruby, ruby, ruby! Gilly clapped her hands. 

We blushed together, my mouth and her skin. I knew to suck and bite like I did with a crab or a bone full of marrow. I sucked up as much breath from her body as I could because I wanted to leave a mark. I learned to make a mark you gotta steal someone's breath and blood and swallow it up, and then the skin gets red mad because it’s missing something. 

I like it, Gilly said. She sounded like she was above water and I was below, in the dark of the creek. 

It tickles! 

I came up for air, shocked by the sunlight, then went in again, closer to her collar. I kept going round and round her neck, Gilly’s giggles rising through me the whole time like bubbles. When I finally resurfaced the sun was making my back clammy and I had a glob of spit on my chin. 

Did it work? Gilly asked, her voice small and squirmy. 

I pulled her up and out from beneath the willow tree, skipping like a satyr. My laughter was thick and guttural. We spun and tumbled and I centered myself around the necklace on Gilly’s throat. Ruby’s made from my mouth and her skin. Our spinning somehow wound us towards home, and as we meandered, I wondered what other jewels I could adorn her with. What other marks could I leave on her skin. 

Is it like Ma’s? Gilly asked. 

Just like Ma’s, I answered. 

Except the Mister does it with his hands instead of his mouth. 

Gilly made her mouth into an O, a silent bird coo, and then began clapping her hands again. 

Ruby, ruby, ruby! 

[subscriptorium]

“I was born” story, homage to Luc Sante

Hannah Calistri 

Prof. Lieu

Advanced Fiction Workshop

February 6, 2021 

John left Mom before spring came, but Paulie didn’t notice. It wasn’t until Mom got a DUI on the corner of Mermaid and Bethlehem Pike that Paulie realized his latest step dad was gone, and that Mom’s latest coping mechanism was rather cliched. When her license was taken she took it as penance. So did Paulie, consequently, who had to drive her to weekly meetings, and for the first time in his life, to church. Mom really did fear God, and Paulie feared what his Mom would do without Him. Even so, by midsummer Paulie was growing more and more detached  and less and less aware of the vices stewing in his Mom’s piety. What he was aware of, however, was his step dad's office, now emptied, and his desk, now an altar. Mom had even taken the lights out of the room to create a dim, clerical ambience. The sort of medieval space that inspired faith in a few, but for most people, like Paulie, it just gave them the creeps. For Paulie, fearing God had now turned into fearing his own Mother. 

One evening, Paulie came home to find his Mom kneeling there, in the heavy August dark, light emanating from nowhere but the crown of her head. Her palms were open votives, luminous as pearls and malleable as clay. It was then, Paulie realized, that she was no longer his mother. 

Come Paulie, she said. Let us pray for your salvation. 

*** 

John left Mom before spring came, but it would take Paulie the whole season to realize the office was boxed up above the garage and his mom was sleeping with a bottle every night. Come June, Paulie braced himself each time he came home. Where would Mom be stewing? In the weeds? On the bathroom floor? In the office, silent, with her hands trailing over a box labelled “misc./golf?” Pictures were smashed and desserts were baked, always past midnight, when Mom couldn’t do anything but waft sweetness and comfort through a house devoid of both. She smiled so often her teeth became synonymous with pity. It wasn’t long until she got a DUI, and then another, and then her license taken indefinitely. Not that it mattered-- she, and that house, had become one thing, and that was a thing made for leaving, which Paulie realized every time he hesitated before the driveway. What if didn’t turn? What if he went straight and kept going through the horse fields until he and the car became one of them, thoughtless and heedless. 

It smelled like smoke when Paulie came home and slammed the door. Not the comforting kind from a bonfire, but the kind tinged with synthetics that smelled like it burned green. His Mom wasn’t stewing in the usual corners. The only sound was the mannish rumble of the washing machine. That’s where Paulie found Mom, standing stark naked in the laundry room. Her skin was splotchy with heated blood. She looked at her son with a closed mouth smile, and her son looked back and realized that she was no longer his mother. 

I’m just waiting for John’s things to dry, she said 

There was a fire in the backyard. The laundry machine kept spinning even though it was empty.