“This world is dying.”

A woman stood in the middle of the crumbling living room in an abandoned house. She looked like a specter, with the dim afternoon sunlight struggling in through the dusty windows at her back, with her flowy dark clothes and her flowy dark hair, with the small deer skulls perched on her head in a macabre wreath. But she sounded just like a woman, sad and maybe getting over a cold.

I stood outside a broken bay window, peering into the living room. “I know,” I replied. “Everyone knows that.”

A little flame sparked as she struck a match, setting it to a sprig of some green plant she held. The glow lit up her face, darkening the hollows of her eyes. “I just don’t know what else to do,” she said. Her hard gaze flicked to my face. “Don’t try to stop me.”

“From what?” I asked. But then she dropped the smoldering herbs.

Sparks leapt in all directions and caught on the dry wood flooring, little tongues of flame curling up around the woman’s bare toes. She stepped delicately over them and made for the door, leaving a small inferno behind.

I stared, mouth agape. The woman joined me outside and watched the living room burn with me.

My eyes watered with the sting of smoke. “Why would you do this?”

She shrugged. “As an offering, I guess.” Fire climbed to the rafters and smoke billowed upward, but it was a windless day and the flames seemed disinclined to leave, though it wouldn’t have mattered. People had abandoned this neighborhood long ago.

“As an apology, too,” the woman continued. “To this world, for my part in helping to kill it.”