Six.
I slept soundly in my dark room on that cold night in January.
The phone rang in the darkness and I listened while my mother answered in hushed frantic tones.
My father ran into my room picking up my blanket with his little girl still wrapped inside, set me in the car along with my brothers and placed the seat belt over my chest. I was Six.

I sat there in the back seat, no longer in darkness, the back seat was now illuminated in yellows and oranges as we pulled into the driveway of the small house now consumed in flames.
I saw the firemen and police men yelling and spraying water on the flames in my grandmother’s house.
I saw the authorities yelling as neighbors wept and screamed. I watched their mouths move but I didn’t hear them.
I didn’t hear anything. I was Six.

My mother took me out of the car and held my hand and I ran beside her down the cold white hallways of the hospital.
The whole family was in the waiting room.
Some loud, asking questions that the doctors could not answer at the time.
some quiet talking in whispers.
Some silent, staring at the tile floor or the ceiling deep in thought. I was Six.

The funeral was small, nothing grand.
All around me more and more tears fell, tears that ran trails down their cheeks and fell to the green grass beneath their feet.
Kind words were said, and on that cold day in January, my grandmother was placed in her reserved hole in the earth.
I stood there as tears finally started to fill my own eyes.
I stood there Six.