She shifted her hips to position herself to better to scroll through the article he’d been reading as he stretched across her for another fritter, his arm connecting with her torso on one side, the table on the other. The plate clattered to the floor. The fritters landed with the heaviness of uncooked meat.

        They bent down at the same time, saw the smoke expanding into the room at the same time. The fire alarm went off. Maria thought of babies. The alarm continued. Lai ran to the kitchen. Maria followed, crouching, elbow jammed across her mouth. The smoke around the stove was thick gray, but she could see the color of the fire that sprayed out of the frying pan. The flame she had left on, normally blue beneath the pan, had been consumed by orange.

        “Wet some towels!” Lai’s words came through in a spiral as he ran to get the fire extinguisher.

        Maria could only find the white tea towels some friends had given them for their marriage. She ran them under the faucet. The smoke thickened.

        “The towels!” Lai yelled.

        Later, when she and Lai were hunched against the door of the ambulance sent alongside the firetrucks, she wondered about the din of fire. They’d yelled. Lai and she both, when she’d dialed 9-1-1. The operator had told them to get out of the house.

        “We need to get out of the house,” she’d yelled to him.

        She remembered how the smoke alarm had shaken up through her bare feet. But she didn’t remember the fire as loud. Loud, maybe, compared to the silence in the ambulance, she and Lai on one side, a teenaged volunteer pretending to study a chart on a clipboard on the other. Loud, maybe, compared to the way silence seemed a solid thing as they waited for the firemen to deem the house safe to reenter.

        “We’re fine,” Lai kept telling everyone.

        She thought maybe the smoke had been loud. She could smell it on herself. Lai had asked for a tissue. The mucus had been black.

        “Look.” He had shown her.

        She wished for that loudness now, back in the house. Ash dimmed every surface to grayscale. Windows had been opened for the smoke to leave. Black footprints from the firemen tracked all around the house, each one smudged in a distinct way.

        She felt she should say something to Lai. Some kind of sorry, a gift of guilt.

        He’d stood in the kitchen with her, looking at the scorched stove. Then he’d gone upstairs, leaving the windows wide, where she knew she’d find the shape of his indifferent body in their bed.