The developers have cordoned off the area with orange flags, and the men in the pub agree that they're trying to salvage the wood to resell. They're all discussing the new development, particularly the fact that in tearing up the railroad tracks, the developers have made stacks of redgum railroad sleepers-long, wooden beams that Ray's friend Frank is sure would make fantastic firewood. Later that day, Ray finds himself at the pub with a few of his friends. 'How many nested imitation terracotta pots could the public want in one morning?' (129) 'So what if he was late?' Kennedy writes. He thinks he'll definitely be late for work, but he doesn't care. Up ahead, he hears the loud cracks and rumbles of excavators breaking ground. This monotonous process repeats until Ray passes through. The word SLOW drills into his brain as he watches the sign turn, let a few cars through, turn to stop, and turn back again.

Ray finally rolls up to the sign-holder, acknowledges him, and drives on. In the moment, when he assumes she's moving out, 'she’d rolled her eyes like he was the thickest kid in the class.

When Sharon broke up with him, he hadn't seen it coming, but to her, it was so obviously not working. Ray then reflects on the end of their relationship. People harass the sign holder, sometimes even run them down. He replies by explaining how the job does, actually, have its challenges. Ray feels like this comment is meant to be a subtle dig at him, because he used to work on a road crew. In the memory, a man holding a stop sign lets traffic through little by little, and Sharon comments on how the job must be the easiest out there. Seeing the road crew reminds him of the time he and his ex-girlfriend, Sharon, were driving to his sister's place for a barbecue, and they were also faced with traffic and a road crew. He thinks that if the developers were from the town, he could be working on a road crew right now but they're not, so instead he works a part-time job and lives in his friend's shed. Kennedy describes Ray's stalled, languished state of mind as mirroring the traffic.

But developers from out of town are redoing the roads, and now there's a line of cars. The story begins with the protagonist, Ray, sitting in traffic, which rarely exists in his small town.

Like a house on fire