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When it comes down to it, she hasn’t kept anything. Not the china or the silverware, not the enormous flat-screen television she never wanted in the first place, not the bed. Definitely not the bed. She wants a clean start, a new beginning, and for a reason she is probably unwilling to look into too deeply, that involves keeping nothing. More than keeping nothing. It is the reason she has rented this U-Haul and is driving to some deserted place in the desert with a couple of cans of gasoline and an entire box of matches. Because what if the wind keeps blowing them out.

They say that fire is cleansing–she’s sure she’s read that someplace, the cleansing power of fire. And if she’s read it, she believes it. Unlike the way she is never going to believe anything anyone–any man–tells her.

It is more work than she anticipated carting all that stuff–the stuff her lawyer worked so diligently to ensure she would get–out of the U-Haul. But it should be work, right? Sweat is probably cleansing, too.

It’s work too, dousing it all with the gasoline. Which stinks, and spills on her shoes, so she tosses those in as well.

Somebody who’d been to India told her that wives are sometimes known to throw themselves onto their husband’s funeral pyre. At the time, she wondered if these women did this voluntarily, or if they were pushed. Now, watching the objects of her marriage go up in flames, she’s sure. Definitely pushed.