The matchbook. It’s nothing more than a scrap of cardboard, a red-and-white drawing of a pizza on the back, a few sticks inside, and yet, it feels special, important. He stops to study the row of abandoned homes before him: a hint of blue paint on one of the windowsills, a molding doormat on the porch. A sign on the door looks like a warning, but it’s faded enough that he figures if it mattered, it doesn’t anymore. Maybe this house had been cheerful, beautiful even. Happy. And now lifeless, unused.

Inside, the air is thick with mildew and a smell that he recognizes as cat piss, which makes his nose and eyes burn. In the living room there’s a folding table, an armchair covered in shredded, rose-printed fabric, a lumpy old sofa with stuffing poking through the seat. He strikes the first match and holds it to the stuffing, part of him hoping it won’t catch, the rest of him egging it on, coaxing, waiting. He feels a strange pull inside of him, between terror and excitement, fear and hope. It smokes for a moment before the flame starts to grow. Already he is picturing the swarm of police standing in front of the charred ruins, their mouths agape. It pleases him, too, to release the house from its sadness, to hide some of the city’s shame. If it can’t be beautiful, the way it once was, then let it not exist at all. And it will give the cops something to do other than ignore his pain.

He closes his eyes and pictures the candles his grandmother used to light, the tall glass jars with saints’ faces painted on the fronts. He opens his eyes and watches the fire get bolder, bigger. Flames rip from one end of the sofa to the other. He stands in front of it, holding his hands to the heat like it’s a hearth. He feels some of his anger burning up, too, like it has been used up by the flame, turned to smoke. It clouds the air, low and gray, until it makes him cough and his lungs burn. A feeling he’s never been able to forget. For many years after his grandparents died, he would still wake with a start most nights, thinking he smelled smoke wafting down the hall.