Through the darkened clouds and then through a zigzag of turns, a bolt of ride-lightning, pink at the peaks never to be seen through the hole in our window. The roof was more of a sponge. Without the services, some call them utilities, we all slept at the kitchen table abutted to an oven. In it there'd been set a fire that had since extinguished. I poked one of the mustaches to my left and motioned for him to break off some more wood from the gutted backroom. If I go, you all come, too, he said. So we all said ok as we huddled in the backroom, under blankets, to the lightning and the leaky roof while the mustache took a sledgehammer to a useless stud. That's when we heard the crackle and turned and saw the pale orange of an engulfed oven. The mustache dropped the wood and said, that solves that, and we all headed back to the kitchen where it was warm. That's when the storm was turned off and all you could hear was what was left of the streets' residue circling the drains.

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Added to The Corduroy Mtn. on February the Twenty Fourth in the year Two Thousand and Nine.