Coming home’s a childhood housefire experienced late. Even so, it was an absurd re-entry.

The Mitsubishi Mirage, a rental, bottomed out in the muddy approach of Mom’s drive, and when I caught traction in limestone trenches, the car fishtailed, launched, and damn-near pilloried me within the steering wheel. I would’ve splintered through the garage door had it not already gaped upon what must’ve been a score of disgruntled yard gnomes.

I wasn’t supposed to be here, but I opened the car door as if I belonged. I breathed deeply of the metallic, swampy air wafting warm, ghostly. Spring rains had agitated winter-laid road salt. Gasoline in the ridged red-plastic container sloshed. I heaved it from twelve cubic feet that Mitsubishi dared declare a trunk.

Alfhild Gundersun next door, if still alive, might be home. She might have noticed my graceless entrance. She also would have witnessed The Fire. There’d been three days of news buzz, high school acquaintances interviewed, all obligatorily shocked to prayer. A just-world hypothesis, they’d learned, governed no true story. Next door, Mister Gundersun’s bald head blurred behind delicate thrift-store window hangings.

After I’d trundled to the front door, with my boot toes cold from rain-loaded lawn, a succulent bullfrog slalomed on slick mud behind a weedy prickle of pyracantha. The house shades were drawn, and a flashing light alerted me to a motion-sensing camera in the window.

Security cameras. A veritable murder of gnomes. What else had Mom aspired to in this my scorched absence? I shouldered open the door as some siren warbled across town.

My pre-puberty home: childhood memory palace. The kitchen had been remodeled. Fire remediation. Before, when it’d been just me and Mom, the cabinets had been wood, chipping behind handles where fingernails raked paint. Linoleum had felt wrinkly underfoot, with orangish lines forming graham-cracker rectangles. The countertops, once foam-green laminate, had crystalized to sleek milky quartz. I ran a thumb along the sharp edge to a sink sporting a curved goose-neck faucet.

The living room, this had hardly changed. The couch slanted in its usual position, facing down the corridor to the bathroom, where I’d sprinted as a boy with a blanket in my shirt collar to dive over the arm into cushions (Superman!), scooting the couch one varnish-gouging inch at a time. The same soundless pendulum clock vigorously axed time.

In the corner of the room, though, was the most infuriating alteration yet. It was an easel. A knife encrusted with black paint lay in a tray. I tore off the frayed-fabric dust covering.

The canvas edges sloped, raised, from paint caked over paint, from slopped color and sloppier brush strokes that arced, nightmarish, inward on a vortex. The walls of the room warped, constricting, hemmed me in. An aroma floated, nutty and cedar-sweet.

The painting rendered a house. This house, but the old version. Flame-licks blazed behind windows.

Inside, a crude silhouette of a boy.