All Virginia had were brushes with tragedy: the Rite Aid held up 10 minutes after she’d left; a light pole crashing down on highway traffic, metal twisting across three lanes, South-bound terror while she motored safely North. Compared to her brother, who returned for the holidays last year missing three fingers, Virginia felt ashamed by her lack of trauma, as if she’d arrived on Christmas Eve empty handed, no presents or Christmas cheer.

Her mother nodded, adding That was lucky and My my, and her father’s thumb rubbed the remote buttons as if he were reading Braille. Twice she saw him lay it back on the couch’s arm, so tempted to un-mute the television during the first ten minutes of his daughter’s return.

But she never mentioned fire, holding it close as a secret tattoo. The controlled burns all along her September jaunt up I-55, the downtown barbeque pit that blazed until it loosed long lashes of flame into the night sky. The faulty wire in the computer lab, the bottle rocket that sent up the church dumpster, the butt that smoldered beneath the cedar. All hers, fires in her immediate path or wake, as if they were signaling her, or her them. The fire that charred the other half of her duplex had started it all, and she could still smell the torched upholstery of her neighbor’s couch, retrieved too late and set on the porch. Everywhere: even her mother’s innocent Ficus Retusa — its leaves in the right light like the smoke damage around her bathroom mirror, where the fire had tried to invade her side of the duplex, each black mark a gnarled finger.