House on Division Street

She stopped suddenly, as they walked down a street in the evening, and pointed at a strange angle of white wall over battered roofs, luminous on a black sky in the glare of an old lantern, with a dark, barred window like that of a dungeon, and she whispered:
"How beautiful!"
"What's beautiful about it?" Lydia asked.
"Because it's so strange...promising...as if something could happen here..."
"Happen to whom?"
"To me."

- We the Living by Ayn Rand

The condemned, two-story house
was like an old movie screen
when police cars projected images
against its rotten siding
with their red and blue lights

and the sirens accompanied
the actors as they flickered
against its exterior
along with stray dogs,
all watching
the house across the street
burn to the ground.