I drew pants out of my backpack like a well bucket brimming pennies. Legs upon legs tied together in a campfire circle and sitting on moss'd rocks, listening to rock music, drinking Rolling Rock, and nothing else. I pulled up on inseams to a single black pocket liner sixteen cents richer, but the fire. Oh, that fire, flames whipping weaker than slave drivers weaker than the wind bailing low-lying lake water to the faux Dover beach mound of sand by the mud shore like the crayfish were drowning. The sand was like trampled "welcome" mats worn-in by sidestepping horseshoe players setting down their tin cans by the mound. A pitching machine on the pitcher's mound. Machines have made the big leagues. I quit baseball when Coach Seth castrated my half-friends with a robot. Some took red stitches to the face, the lucky ones. But the fire—if you could consider a Bunsen burner-esque flame a fire—turned our burnt sienna bottles into burning-out beacons, tiki torches between pine trees, street lamps kicking off in four hours, a box of matches, and a lightning bug's ***.