Outside the house, something flashes firework bright. My ears hurt, in the burning way they did long ago when I was twenty and contracted an infection from a midnight swim. The window ripples and bows inward like a soap bubble. I watch it stretch: a long, endless second as it bulges towards some plastic limit. Then it screams. I have never heard glass scream before. I discover in this moment that the sound is beautiful even as it is appallingly painful. Screaming glass is transcendent, the lamentation of lovers frozen in different fragments and now tumbling apart. The shriek barges so deeply into my ears that I can feel it in my stomach, and then I stop hearing at all and the window goes white as one layer of the laminate is pulverised, absorbing the force of the explosion as it should—as it is designed to do. Laying itself down.