Standing in the doorway, I took one of the gas cans out of the bag and started splashing it around the living room.

From the street Morris let out a little gasp of horror. His sandwich was still in his hand but splayed out like a deck of cards because he was gripping it so tightly. He asked me what I was doing but again I did not reply, though when I made to come outside again he immediately stepped backward, frightened.

I passed by him and walked to the other side of the street, splashing gasoline on the false-front buildings.

“Miss Lincoln! Bonnie! Please stop this! Are you all right?”

I snapped around and pointed at him. “EAT YOUR SANDWICH, YA BIG TURKEY!” For the first time since Rita had left, I was getting into the spirit of the show again. I remembered epithets that Janet had used. “GO HOME, FINK!” Janet, my favorite. I began laughing. My face was wet with tears or sweat, I couldn’t tell. I swiped at it with the back of my hand.

He was pale and his tie was askew, and my words, like magic, seemed to knock his sandwich out of his hand, its limp contents dropping to the ground. I continued along the street and turned down another block, and he trailed me all the way, helplessly, like a zombie.

After a few more minutes of walking I stood in front of my precious Arcade Florists, Janet’s old workplace that had been such a refuge for me during my first year here. For a moment I stared at it, remembering my days there. Then I picked up the gas can I’d just emptied at Furley’s and threw it toward the window, and it was like listening to one of my own bones break. The hysteria that had been building inside me mushroomed, and I started howling obscenities until my throat bled. Somehow knowing I had an audience made it that much worse, and it was like the old days after I had just won the lottery, when I wished only to shock everyone, to watch their faces turn to ash and vanish in the wind.

I took one of the smaller kerosene bottles out of the bag, the squeeze kind used to start up a grill. I held it at hip level in front of me. “Let’s give ’em a show, Morris!” I hollered, lasciviously squirting kerosene over the doorstep, onto the door’s lintel.

This, out of everything he had just witnessed—the window breaking, the gas on the Furley’s carpet, the demented yelling—at last offended him into action. Shakily he drew a phone out of one of his pockets and began texting, and seeing this one motion—something I had forgotten in the intervening years but was still familiar to me, the meaning of it—had me at his throat in a flash, so fast I didn’t even recall moving, and then I was thwapping it out of his hands, crushing its screen under my heel.