2024 Best of the Fest Winner

Untitled

by Suzanna Cook

There have been all these articles circulating recently about how heat affects the brain. How it makes you fuzzier, slower, angrier. August tried to focus on a patch of sunlight streaming in the shop window and imagine the heat dulling the parts of her brain she wanted dulled; like her pride, or maybe her general uneasiness.

“Does it matter? We’ll all be underwater soon. Literally, all of this will be, in 40 or so years...”

Right. She’s with a customer. The kind that takes a simple ‘how are you’ and runs with it as far as possible.

“...all flooded, every rainy season, except for the parts that are high enough elevation. And even those’ll be, what? 120 degrees in the summertime? Really, that’s what the latest reports say...”

Could that be right? August received this news alongside that familiar feeling of whatever the opposite of surprise is. Maybe indifference. Secretly, she sometimes even relished the syrupy slow and quiet that’s been accompanying the recent heat waves. She liked that the concrete almost feels like it’s burning her bare feet, but not quite. Not yet.

“...and no one cared for so long. No one cared and now it’s too late. We’ll go extinct.”
August searched for the right words to end this conversation and send the customer on his way.

“No, I don’t believe that. We’re like cockroaches. Or horseshoe crabs. We’ll make do,” she landed on. But who wants to scurry from corner to corner? Rot in the sand? August’s thoughts wandered away again. Suburban people recently seemed to be processing for the first time how heat can leave you dead if you’re not careful, will leave people dead - does. How it brings attention to the body and holds you hostage there in that present moment, reckoning with it. Just like this guy.

“How do you think they’ll remember us, then?” he pleaded. August blinked at him and tried to remember how they had gotten here. One minute she’d been taking lunch orders. Now, this stranger seemed to have placed his entire worldview in her arms. “If we don’t go extinct. If there are future people. What will they make of the lives we lived?”

August took a closer look at the customer. His eyes were saying something desperate. She had a strange feeling that she needed to choose her words carefully. Whatever she said back would be much more important to him than it should be.

She glanced behind him at the line slowly forming. “I get what you mean,” she offered. “But I don’t think so much about how the future people will talk about us; it’s more about whether the people before us could see us coming clearly enough. And if we can... do that too. Do y’know what I mean?”

“No.”
August sighed, her patience quickly sapped. “Listen, if there’s something I can help you with-” “Can you help me though? Understand what you mean, I mean?” he cut in.
They held each other's gaze. August opened her mouth, then closed it. Then opened it again.

The older woman in line behind him huffed loudly, tapping her foot. The young man startled and looked at the woman with two wide eyes, like she’d broken some kind of spell. Turning red, he hurried out, leaving the door open for the A/C to escape. For the heat to invade, technically. But not before leaving August with one last glance.

Stepping forward, the older woman chuckled: “Weather changes, but not people. Crazy. Crazy as ever.”

August swallowed the lump in her throat and took the woman’s order.