The bowling alley in McLeod’s been shut down for years, just like the old McLeod movie theater and the old high school and just about everything else. A lot of the small central region towns are shrinking away to nothing, and McLeod suffers particularly by being just a little too close to Portage. The old buildings were boarded up ages ago, but somewhere Dad heard about the stockpile of bowling pins sitting there going to waste in the abandoned bowling alley.

A signal must have registered in his head, a dotted line stretching from the old bowling lanes direct to our fireplace. Other people might see something nostalgic or sad, but he took a look and saw fuel. Bowling pins are wood. They’re burnable.

It never before occurred to me to wonder what a bowling pin might look like on the inside, but I would have guessed they were solid through and through, cut with a lathe out of chunks of tough dry hardwood. But they’re not. They’re glued together in two lengthwise sections, and there’s a little hollow—oval shaped-in the middle.

They take a while to catch alight. You need lots of kindling, little chips of hardwood or balled-up newspaper. Then you see a flare of white light, which is the paint catching fire (the pins are painted an ivory color with a red stripe around their middles), and before you know it the entire skin is flaky ash. Then the fire finds a way into the core. The center burns brightly, deeply red, so that the sides look transparent, more like glass than wood, more like bottles than bowling pins. The red heart keeps getting brighter and brighter and then, suddenly, with a snap it cracks open. “Thar she blows,” Sally says, seconds before the third pin splits itself exactly in two.

Dennis leans over and gently places two more nose to nose on the grate. He’s loving this. By now we’ve turned out the floor lamp and all the table lamps, leaving just the lit tree and the light from the fire.

It makes me dizzy looking at those pins burning. I think, now they’re going, now they’re gone. I remember the last time Dennis and I were on a plane, and the pilot, crossing a time zone, asked us to adjust our time pieces. Our time pieces. What a word. We twiddled a dial, and there was an hour erased.

Purse is talking about growing up in Swan River, how he used to set pins after school, earning thirty cents an hour and how he read True Detective Magazine between lanes. The kids stare at his face, which happens to be a rather large, quiet, undemanding face, and I can tell they’re wondering how things get so displaced and changed like this.