She had kept it in her hand, the firecracker, and it had gone off with a BANG so loud that everything—the screams, the adults’ questions after, the boombox music, everything in her head—went quiet.

Just a little Black Cat, just a stick meant to spark and explode. They were all lighting firecrackers, all of the kids, past third base, with the adults on picnic blankets up on the hill watching them. Everyone was here after their cookouts waiting for the big fireworks show, staking out seats in the ballpark by the playground, the one with the good view above the tree line, killing time, here waiting for the sun to go down.

She knew what to do with a firecracker; she knew to throw it right away, but she had held it in her palm. She’d looked down at it, then away at the last second, out at the trees where the sun was taking forever to set. In summer it always took way too long to go down. It would never be night; it was still too light to see any fireworks; the sky pale and only hinting at color.

But for a moment, even before it went off, everything behind her went kind of dusky and distant and soft, like she was about to forget it all.

And then the BANG!

She’d kept her hand open to the sky, but closed it at the last minute, held on to the firecracker. A bent finger, a broken thumb. The skin seared a bit, broke open a bit. Then bruised black and blue.

Why had she done it? She had just done it.

The scars would keep, and everyone would keep asking her about it for a while, and then not. And then sometimes, years later, she would tell the story as a different kind of story. But she would still remember, even decades later, an adult herself, the moment of decision. She would still recall the pause that came right before, the quiet and the way she had felt, waiting.