I went out to the garage. Inside, the Fatties were waiting. I had the distinct sense that they were judging me—not for lighting the match, but for letting it burn out and take nothing with it. They leered at me. They whispered among themselves. Their clay eyes were rimmed with pity. Furious, I began to destroy them. All of my mother’s work. Some were hard and dry, and I beat at them with my mother’s sledgehammer. Many were still soft, and I twisted their limbs, massaged their shoulders onto the floor in clumps. I smashed and tore and clawed and cut until I was standing in a room full of clay mounds and dust with a group of rebar skeletons, some of them knocked prone, but most still standing, bare and scraping as winter trees. The Fatties had thin dead women inside of them the whole time. Well, it figured.

I spared Beth. I am sentimental in that way.

In the morning, my arms were sore and I was ashamed. I went downstairs and made coffee, the way my mother and I liked it, much too strong for my father. I cleaned up a little, picked the spent matches from the floor and sent them down the garbage disposal. But when I finally approached the closet door, key in hand, I couldn’t hear her inside.

“Mom?” I tried. Nothing. I turned the key and opened the door. The closet was clean and organized. Nothing was on the floor. My mother’s shoes were in their boxes. The overhead bulb burned. I couldn’t see her. I felt a stab of panic. Had she been transported or simply transformed? Had she deserved punishment or escape?

“Hello?” I said.

And there she was, coming from behind the coats, as though being birthed whole and enormous from folds of wool and fur.

“What have you done?” she asked, stepping out into the light. She had changed her clothes, but her face was drawn and tired. I was sure she already knew. She could sense that the Fatties had been murdered. Now I realize that, like the fire, their destruction was something she might have done herself. That’s how she knew I had done it.

I said nothing.

“Why do you want to hurt me?” she said.

I thought, How can I possibly hurt you when you have all the power?

She ran her hands through her hair and winced. “I may have a concussion,” she said.

As she pushed past me, I thought: She would have done it right; she would have lit the draperies. As her favorite author once wrote: Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam.