[ 1 2 3 ]	Mama Jones had to know that her family was struggling. We imagined her, trying to go about her day like she only knew how: doing laundry, cleaning house, preparing meals. We imagined her clothes remained wrinkled no matter how much she ironed them and the surfaces still dusty no matter how many times she wiped them down. The weight of guilt she carried on her shoulders sunk into the food as she cooked it, wishing she could serve her kids more than rice and canned vegetables, no money for meat. She had to want to do right by them. She probably wanted to do something, go to therapy, take a trip, get high, get away, no money for that either. But silence is cheap, and that’s how they suffered. We could see them in our minds, sitting at the dining room table in front of finished plates, remaining hungry, not speaking. We wanted to invite them over to our house for dinner, but whenever our parents rang the bell, none of the Joneses emerged to answer. They just let the chimes ding and we eventually gave up, our parents telling each other that maybe they weren’t home and that they used to be so friendly. But we both knew they were home. Alex from across the street said she came out once, said he saw Mama Jones standing on the rickety porch in her house coat, but Alex is always making up stories. We wanted to believe him, asked him what she was doing. He said she just stood there, eyes puffy from days of crying, staring out into the street. But we hadn’t seen any of them leave the house since Father Jones had died. We went about our lives. What more could we do? Still practically joined at the hip, we went to school, played kickball with the other boys, kissed our parents, said our prayers, and eventually forgot about the struggling Jones family in the dying house. That was until we came home from the playground that day. We were walking up the block and saw the clouds of smoke billowing into the sky. We rushed closer, our identical book bags bouncing on our backs, and we reached the police blockages, able to see the amber flames rising from the Jones house, like a corpse being cremated. We snuck under the barricades, telling the officers that we lived on the block and made our way through the murmuring crowd, people asking: How did it happen? Was the family inside? How did it start?