I never learned to read the signs anyway. Only ever operated an off-road vehicle one time with Bill, so if I die in this body, it won’t even matter, because I have conquered death and know nothing is permanent, so there’s nothing to be afraid of.

One of these lights in the darkness is the moon, in some stage of being there and then gone.

My heartbeat pumps me full of gasoline. The rhythm beats the walls of my chest like a ticking time bomb about to explode.

The damp walls of the outhouse, my sanctuary off the beaten path from my childhood home, are what I remember best. The ivy overgrowing so it crept inside. Moonlight snuck through a crescent at the top of the door when it was full. It twinkled on the glass jars, which tussled with tortured insects in the toilet hole—moths with no wings, daddies with no long legs. I pinched off their body parts with tweezers and suffocated them with their fallen brethren.

All I see is wood now. In this blackness, the walnuts, pines, maples, and oaks appear all by themselves. I see them struck by lightning, crushing houses and the people in them. Cars crashing into trees. Balconies collapsing in flame; people burning with them. Splinters poking out of children’s fingers and shins—bleeding body parts detached from their people. Brown and red leaves floating everywhere.

I come from a family of tree lovers. Uncle Rod’s cabin is up the bend of some unlabeled, unassuming forest in northern Georgia. I haven’t seen him visit Annie and Momma, who still live in that house together. Annie’s done nothing but sleep and cry since graduation. Momma just works, smokes cigarettes, and stares dead-eyed out of windows.

Every time I visit, she turns to the darkness to face me.

“Sawyer?” she gasps, and the sudden spark of light tears like a lightning bolt through my skin, blinding me.

Electrical ballasts, fluorescent bulbs, power boxes—they’re my sworn mortal enemies. The aura of fear is weakest when people can see what’s around them. I guess Momma doesn’t know that, because she thinks that when I died, I died forever. Now whenever she tries to see me better, all she does is cast me out.

Rod let the family fall apart in the wake of his crimes. He left my aunt and my cousins.

He lives alone in this cabin, which I park in front of, on the road past the driveway. I drop the matchbox in my pocket and stick the kerosene bottle and gun into the back of my jeans so they’re hidden under my sweater. After putting on the gloves, I walk up the driveway and down a walkway framed by bushes.

Then I’m on the front porch, practicing my breathing in the way Dr. Scott taught me.

The crickets thrum in the surrounding forest—the audience for my final act.