It was 2 am, a damp morning. For most of the night, brittle fusillades had assailed our windows. It was a night in the first week of the Chinese New Year. A night of a thousand little firecrackers.

So when the first loud bang came, I slept through it. “What was that?” my girlfriend asked, nudging me awake. “Nothing,” I said.

Then, as if to specifically disagree, the bang repeated itself. This wasn’t nothing after all. It was something. I rose from bed and looked out the window, scanning Alice Street from one end to the other. When what to my wondering eyes would appear, but a hatchback aflame, its warped hood drowning in deep red fire.

The rest of Alice Street? Empty. Not a soul. No drunken Ruby Room fugitives. No alacritous garbagemen. No slow sidling cars with their lights off. Nothing but this incongrous car, flickering with the hum-crackle of a bonfire. My girlfriend joined me at the window. “Hunh,” she said. “Umm,” I replied.

Minutes later, the firemen arrived. They took to the car with their hose and their pickaxes, smashing the windows and prying the hood, dousing the car in white foam. Then, like the cavemen who fell a mammoth, they poked the carcass. They checked for signs of life.