November Heat

Helen sat at her kitchen table in western Massachusetts, deliberately not looking at the thermometer outside her window. Her daughter Sarah was at it again, pacing the linoleum floor like a doomsday prophet, iPhone clutched in her hand like it was broadcasting the word of God himself.

"Mom, please," Sarah said, her voice tight with that anxiety Helen had always blamed on too much internet. "They're evacuating half of Vermont. The fires are—"

"Oh, for heaven's sake." Helen stirred her coffee with more force than necessary. "There have always been forest fires. And dry spells. When I was teaching, we had plenty of warm Novembers." She didn't mention that 'warm' back then had meant fifty degrees, not today's sixty-eight. She didn't think about how she'd had to pack away her sweaters this year, still unworn.

Sarah stopped pacing, her face flushed. "Right. Just like there were always hurricanes, right? That's what you said last year when I begged you to install storm shutters. Before that category five took out half the coast. Just like there were always droughts, before the Colorado River died. Just like—"

"I don't need a lecture from my own daughter." Helen's voice had that sharp edge she'd used on stubborn students for forty years. "I've lived through every doomsday prediction they could dream up. Y2K. Nuclear winter. Acid rain. The ozone hole. And here we still are."

"Jesus Christ, Mom." Sarah slumped against the counter, suddenly looking older than her thirty-five years. "You know what your problem is? You think this is an argument you need to win. Like it's parent-teacher night and you're defending your curriculum. But nature doesn't care if you believe in it or not. It's not a democracy."

Helen opened her mouth to respond, but her words were cut off by the emergency alert sound from both their phones. Sarah grabbed hers first, her face draining of color as she read.

"They're evacuating Hampshire County," she said, her voice hollow. "The Berkshire fires jumped the firebreak. They're saying the wind—" She stopped, looking up at her mother. "Mom, we have to go. Now."

Helen wanted to argue. Wanted to tell her daughter she was being dramatic again. But through the kitchen window, she could see the sky had taken on that strange copper color she'd only ever seen in news footage from California. The wind that rattled her windows carried the smell of woodsmoke, and not the cozy kind from her neighbor's fireplace.

Her phone buzzed again. Then again. Emergency alerts stacked up like playing cards: Mandatory evacuation. Road closures. Air quality warnings. The maple tree she and George had planted thirty-five years ago cast flickering shadows on her kitchen floor. Its leaves, confused by the endless warm autumn, had never fully turned. Now they might never get the chance.

"I never thought..." Helen's voice trailed off as ash began to drift past her window like gray snow, settling on her November roses that hadn't known to die back this year. In the distance, she could hear sirens.

Sarah was already pulling her go-bag from the closet – the one Helen had mocked her for leaving here. "Never thought what, Mom?"

Helen stood up slowly, her coffee forgotten. "Never thought it would happen here," she said softly. "To us."

The wind picked up outside, hot and hungry, and Helen finally understood what Sarah had been trying to tell her all along: nature didn't care what you believed. It just was. And now it was coming for them all, believers and deniers alike.

"Come on," Sarah said, taking her mother's arm. "We need to go. Now."

As Helen let herself be led to the door, she thought about all those school board meetings where she'd argued against updating the science curriculum to include climate change. All those Thanksgiving dinners where she'd dismissed Sarah's concerns as millennial anxiety. All those years of certainty, crumbling like ash in the November heat.

The emergency sirens wailed across the valley, singing a song of too little, too late.

(by Claude)