Fire

(Peking University - Beijing, China)
One evening, my roommate and I come home from dinner and the power goes out. This happens about once a week as the university thinks that everyone sleeps by midnight (or that all the students SHOULD go to sleep by midnight) and so it's OK to turn the electricity off and hope people don't notice.

We light candles and get ready for bed. I blow out all the candles and then go to bed. In the middle of the night, I wake up and look towards my roommate. To my utter and complete HORROR, her bed is ENGULFED in flames!

I am scared shitless, I yell out her name. The flames are so huge I can't even figure out where she is, or if she's even on the bed. Turns out, she's calmly batting the flames with her pillow case and saying that everything is OK, she's got everything under control.

"Under control" my ASS. I dump a basin of water (we keep a basin filled with water in our room to provide moisture because the heater makes our room really dry) on her bed, but not before asking her of course since i didn't want to drench her bed for nothing. There is a sizzling sound, the flames fizzle away. My heart is beating 240 rpm (faster than German techno, eh?) and it stays stuck in my throat for quite awhile.

So you're wondering, what the HELL had happened? But first, some relevant history. My roommate has strange sleeping patterns or perhaps a sleeping disorder of sorts because around 10 p.m. everyday she says,"I'm tired" and literally KONKS out on her bed, wakes up between 3 and 5 a.m., tries to finish the homework that she didn't finish cause she konked out so early, konks out again 45 min. to an hour later, wakes up at 6 or 7 a.m. to finish the homework and goes to class by 8 a.m..

It's bizarre because she falls asleep almost instantaneously. And I am NOT exaggerating, about 3 seconds after she utters the words, "I'm tired," she keels over, pen and paper in hand, glasses on face, homework and books on the bed (she usually sleeps with a pile of books and clothing on her bed,too). Not a very good habit to have, it seems.

Anyway, so that night, she wakes up at 4 a.m., decides to write in her journal, lights a candle, PUTS THE CANDLE ON HER BED (mistake #1), writes for a while, feels tired (uh-oh!), manages to cap her pen but NOT put out the candle before she konks out, literally, in about 2 seconds from the time that she was consciously aware of the fact that she still had to blow the candle out (mistake #2). Four seconds later the bed catches on fire and the rest is history.

First of all, who in their right mind would put a candle on a bed?!?!?!

The next day, our room was a veritable black and smoky mess. And to top it off, the girl had a goose DOWN comforter that was burned in the fire and let out about a million little down feathers into our room, EVERYWHERE. Oh don't worry, we all gave her shit for that little fiasco.