Twenty years after the fire, however, a local newspaperman named Michael Ahern admitted he made up the cow story to sell newspaper copy. The true cause? The authorities couldn’t tell. A spark from a chimney perhaps. Or arson. It’s a possibility this time—some itinerant passing vagrant with a desire akin to your own. You like that idea.

There’s another theory, though, one you like even more. The Chicago fire, despite its infamy, was actually only one of several fires in the same area at the same time. It wasn’t even the largest. A little further north, on the shores of Lake Michigan, a forest fire developed into a firestorm the likes of which has never been seen again. This time two and a half thousand people were killed. In the small town of Peshtigo so many died there weren’t enough residents left alive to identify the bodies. Hundreds were buried in mass graves. One and a half million acres of land scoured clean.

But that was only the beginning. On the east coast of the lake, the town of Holland was razed to the ground, along with the lumber community of Manistee a hundred miles further north. Further east still, on the shores of Lake Huron, another fire swept through the town of Port Huron, and a few days later both Urbana, Illinois, just south of Chicago, and Windsor, Ontario, were also ravaged.

What chances? All these separate fires in the same area at the same time. Ignatius L. Donnelly had his own theory about that. He was a U.S. congressman and what might generously be called a bit of an eccentric. You wonder if you will get off that lightly. He had some interesting thoughts concerning the lost city of Atlantis, though, and his theory of catastrophism posited that the ancient civilization was destroyed by a global catastrophic event, a volcano or meteor strike. As evidence for his theory, Donnelly put forward the simultaneous fires of the Chicago area of 1871. He placed the blame for the fires on a single cosmic event, the periodic Comet Biela that broke up as it passed over America, raining fiery death upon the population in the form of methane-rich meteorite fragments.

The thought some future scholar might place the blame for your actions on a cosmic event appeals to you. But, you have to admit, that isn’t likely unless you upscale a bit; hard to imagine anyone constructing an elaborate theory about the destruction of an old shed on an allotment.

You look up into the clear night sky and you think perhaps you catch a glimpse of a shooting star. At the same time something in the shed catches, and all of a sudden the structure is fully ablaze. You sit up and feel the displaced creature fall out of your sleeve. The shed is blazing brightly, the heat licking at your face and warming your skin.