Orange black sky

Survival:
Extant Leftover Remaining Residual Surviving Vestigial Viable Continuation Endurance
Natural Selection Relic Subsist Survive Weather
Survival: of, pertaining to, or for use in surviving, esp. under adverse or unusual circumstances: survival techniques.
Survival: Anthropology. (no longer in technical use) the persistence of a cultural trait, practice, or the like long after it has lost its original meaning or usefulness.

For me, the word ‘survival’ resonates most closely to an experience incurred when an almost teenybopper girl. One cold, wintry morning, I awoke coughing, choking almost, on a grey cloud of smoke. Disoriented in the dim light of a Sunday’s predawn, I turned over in the tossed-sheets of my single bed, in the tiny room of my adolescence, and started screaming. The ceiling of my little bedroom as well as the hallway outside my door was ablaze.
I was not dreaming.
Whereas fight or flight should have kicked-in, for some reason, the proximity of my dad’s beat-up old pick up truck, to what seemed the origination of bright orange flame, had me in a state of panic. Wouldn’t it blow up? Additionally, in my discombobulated state, I was yelling, with a red-hot-with-ache, scratchy from smoke-inhalation sore throat, for my parents, that there was a Fire! Fire! Fire!
Enduring the minutes between my awakenings into the inferno, which was once my family’s home, and the moment I realized I needed to extract myself, I sat there, on my bed, trying to determine whether or not it was safe to stand upright. Wondering if there was any way I could squeeze through the narrow, uniquely house trailer-specific frames of the tri-paned crank-out windows. Disillusioned from the smoke and flame-beset shell of a structure, soon to be emptied into a heap of ash, my actions were leaden.
Although ‘prepared’, in grade school as well as by our parents, for the worst sort of emergency—tornado, fire drill, wind gust or an Alberta clipper snowstorm, there was little familiarity to the seemingly foreign, and most certainly unwelcome, morning scene I had awoken to.
During those drills, you discuss how you might react to ‘emergency’ situations, but I can tell you with the certain truth of a bleary eyed twelve year old girl, that you simply have no way of predicting action of any kind—how exactly, for example, your sleepy body might react? (for me, not nearly as quickly as I likely should have—what, for example, you might think about (Nike hi-tops?). How, for example, you might feel when you see your sister’s stepping to safely out the back door; or to note the color of the sky, a deep black orange, as you glanced backward, as you ran in your bare feet and nightgown, up the snowy hill to an oblivion you had no capacity to imagine.