I was going to say I imagined Rachel in the last paragraph as being maybe nine, but upon further research–

(no, really, research)

–a nine-year-old girl would probably be too tall for "standing on a chair to reach the sink and stove-top” (I literally pulled out a measuring stick to compare the heights this was giving me with my kitchen sink), so I think she must’ve been even younger. Five or six, maybe?

So she got by.  Until the day her mother didn’t come home.

Welp. So what happened? Drink ‘n’ drive accident?

Somehow I feel like we won’t find out.

The food in the cupboards had disappeared, even the cans of pineapple, pears and nuts in foul-tasting syrup that had been left behind by the apartment’s previous residents.  Desperate, terrified to leave the apartment in case the fifteen minutes she spent looking for food were the same fifteen minutes her mother stopped by, she’d turned to trying to cook the rice, standing on a chair to reach the sink and stove-top.

Aww.

After pouring the rice into the water that had been sitting on the hot stove, she’d accidentally brought her arm down on the arm of the pot, and tipped it all over herself.

Ouch.

In retrospect, it was a blessing that she hadn’t known that the water should be boiling.

…ah, yeah, that helps. Still sounds like it was hot, though, even if it wasn’t quite boiling.

Still, it was hot enough to turn her skin pink and leave her screaming enough to drive the neighbors to call nine-one-one.

Yeah, ow. Must’ve been loud.

Alright, let’s do this thing!