He torched the house and stole the road, renaming it and hiding it among the scrub trees and lock-ups on the edge of town. There were nights shifting between cars – hood pulled forward to hide his features, surgical gloves to leave no prints – and days skirting cameras that swept every exit, relaying his absence to sleeping guards on minimum wage. When he ran out of food, he foraged behind chain restaurants and supermarkets abandoned for the night, and when his clothes wore thin, he grew a thick pelt, red as flame. In time he forgot himself as completely as the town had forgotten him, as completely as his dead family had forgotten him, as completely as the abandoned street had forgotten him: so when he woke in a nest of weeds and ash, it meant nothing more than morning, and he didn’t recognise the charcoal letters scribed like scars on his belly.