I felt uneasy. He took the jar from me, drank, and passed it back. The brew began to hurt my teeth, as though it were sweet. Dice said, “We have to burn everything but the bridges.”

“How can we do that?”

Dice said, “For biggest impact from littlest effort, you can’t beat violence.”

I wondered whether I was going crazy. They’d killed my mother and I was letting Dice teach me a lesson.

“You can’t,” he said, “just drop a match on the floor of a power plant and expect that anything will burn fast and hot enough to cause real damage. You have to direct the fire,” he said. “You’ve made jam, bread, leather, cheese, soap—this is no different.” He fetched a jug of gasoline and a stockpot, and put a hot plate on top of his stove with the ships and their sails. “No fire around gas,” Dice said. While we waited for the water to boil, Dice and I shredded bars of soap into chips, using an old cheese grater.

Once the water boiled, we put another pan inside, to form a double boiler, and Dice turned off the hot plate. He told me to fill the inner pot with gasoline. I’d experienced gasoline as a smell, a quiver in the air as it made its ghostly escape from the pump at the station. I’d experienced its relative, diesel, as a taste, sucking it out of Isaac’s biofuel engine. But gas was a liquid too, pale yellow like apple juice. The color of Dice’s eyes.

We heated it in the pot above the boiling water, then stirred in the white chips of soap. The gas fizzed and crackled as it ate up the soap. I’d always liked the smell of gasoline—there was something fresh and atmospheric about it. But the smell changed when the soap went in. It smelled not like death or danger or evil but like sadness—the smell of a poor home like my mother’s, the smell of industrial detergents. We stirred until the mixture took on the consistency of jelly. Dice told us that the carbon in the gas might have come from the corpses of animals who died in the Jurassic or Cretaceous period, but the Appalachian mountains formed long before that, when horseshoe crabs were the closest thing to a land animal. “War fuel for the environment,” Dice said. It was napalm.

* * *

By the end, because of the gasoline or the alcohol, I was having trouble standing. “You’re a good girl,” Dice said. He left me alone. I lay in his bed.

Night fell and I was awake, staring at the crouching shape of my mother, unwilling to move and discover that it was only a blanket on Dice’s pink couch.