Today, there was a fire.

I was standing near my door, getting ready to get in my car and drive to an armful of hugs and a face full of kisses; searching my pockets, taking a mental inventory, and swearing that I had forgotten something.

And I smelled burning.

I knew immediately where it was coming from (the front door), but I still turned all the way around and walked into my kitchen (which is something I think everyone does when they smell burning).

Then I went outside, and the sky was lit up, like sunset. In the middle of the night.

In the center of the incandescent span of deep glow was a single round, red orb. A small hill in the distance, peaking above the flat horizon, silently engulfed in flame.

I yelled over my shoulder for my roommate, and she arrived.

We stared for probably twenty minutes.

Never before has something coming undone looked so beautiful.

On my 40th birthday I said halfway home, but I didn't believe it.

There was a skittering in the skirting boards last night. Some small creature stuck and twisting, desperately scratching about, confined. A baby squirrel or a bat maybe, the latter because we have plenty of bats here and its vocalizations were high-pitched scared clicking noises, panicky sonar. Unless it was some dolphin, swum there in metaphor, but no.

We put duct tape across the slightest gaps and as I lay pretending sleep, the skittering continued, fainter, not in any way like Poe, but only sorry and sad. This morning all is quiet and I woke up thinking of dolphins and the excellent New Yorker cartoon that sees two of them floating across a simply drawn ocean and one, smiling, is saying to the other "I just want to swim with a middle-aged couple from Connecticut before I die."

Me too.

This happened so long ago I can barely remember it.

I was with my mom in the kitchen, and while she prepared some food I concocted a big glass of lemonade. After I poured in the water over the freshly squeezed lemon juice, the water rose up to about an inch below the rim of the glass.

I noticed my mother watching me carefully.

I stood up, walked to the refrigerator, opened it, and took out the ice bag. I stuck my hand inside and took out a large piece of ice (one of those that are a conglomerate of many pieces of ice stuck together) and walked back to where my glass was.

The following events happened in a reasonably normal manner, but note well reader, nothing remotely normal is normal in my crazy old hag's head.

I looked at the glass. I noticed what space was left in it. I looked at the chunk of ice I held in my hand and realized I could never put it in the glass without having most of my lemonade overflow the glass and spill all over the kitchen floor.

I put the ice in anyways.

Lemonade spilt all over the floor made my brutal lack of reasoning quite obvious.

I turned around to look at my mom, who of course witnessed my halfwitted episode, and before I could utter a word she broke into tears.

She literally broke into tears.

I stood there, a third helpless, a third shocked, and a third, honestly amused.

She started saying that she couldn't believe she raised a daughter that would do such senseless things. And it wasn't about the lemonade. It was that my attitude towards the lemonade is how I handle things in life. That I can't think things through, and this behaviour of doing whatever because whatever, would put me in risk more than she could bear. That I would hurt myself, because by not doing the insignificant act of putting a smaller piece of ice into the lemonade meant that I was reckless, senseless, impulsive, unreasonable, and short-witted.

I took a cloth and dried up the lemonade in silence.

She practically dismembered my thought process because the lemonade was spilt.

She kept crying, of course, but I was so disturbed I could do nothing but stare at her.

Was I such a moron?

Fuck.

She must've known all along.