BY Jacob Dimpsey
Through the smoke, the sun looked like a shiny new penny. Below it, a dull red pulsed on
the horizon over the trees, growing closer. I think the winds have shifted, I said, stepping out
onto the deck with my face in my sleeve. With the cell towers and power lines down, there was
no way to know for sure. Fuck, my brother said behind me.
We gathered a few things into our backpacks and my brother picked up my niece from
where she was playing on the floor. She tucked her face into his neck and clutched her toy
elephant. She had become fascinated with the animal after I told her the last one, a female named
Nozomi, had died in a zoo in Tokyo. Did she have a baby before she died? She had asked. I said,
No, sweetie.
We went down to the lake where mist mixed with smoke and hovered over the surface of
the water like spirits lost between Earth and the hereafter. I knelt down to the water and wet a
thin kitchen towel and tied it like a cowboy’s bandana over my niece’s nose and mouth. I did the
same for myself. Can you breathe all right? I asked her. Her eyes burned red like the forest as she
nodded. I thought of her mother. This isn’t the end of everything, she had said, holding my niece
in that hospital bed. My brother was crying so hard, I’m not sure he heard her. But I did.
Coughing, my brother tossed our bags into one of the two old canoes resting in the weeds
along the gravelly landing and pushed it into the water. I handed him a towel and we jumped
aboard.
I remembered rowing in the old canoe with my brother when our family would come up
to the Poconos for the summer. Dragging my hand through the cool water. My parents in the
canoe beside us, racing us, blue sky surrounding them. But our parents were gone. The small
lake was already so shallow, I imagined soon it would be gone too.
The air grew hotter. As we rowed farther out into the lake, we had to stop several times to
rewet the towels because they kept drying out. I turned back to look at the lake house, but it was
completely obscured by smoke. Soon it would be consumed by fire. If we survived, we would
have no home. We would be forced to join the caravans of refugees spat out by the cities where
floods and violence and food shortages had sent them fleeing in search of a place to live where
the land wouldn’t revolt against them.
On our left, the fire had reached the lake. The shore glowed through the smoke like the
belly of a dragon. Like something alive. I was perspiring, but my sweat dried almost immediately
upon exposure to the air, leaving my skin cracked and scaly. Daddy, my niece cried. Just a little
farther, my brother said.
When we reached the middle of the lake, we dropped into the water. My brother and I
held an oar between us for my niece to hold onto. Then we showed her how to lean back so that
only her nose and her mouth were sticking out of the water, covered by the wet towel. It felt like
being waterboarded, but it would keep her alive. We floated like that for a long time. Even after
the fire swallowed the lake and the lake house and it passed over us like an angel of death, we
floated there with our faces to the dark sky, wildfire smoke rendering it formless and void.
Jacob Dimpsey is a writer living in Central Pennsylvania. His work has previously appeared in The SFWP Quarterly and Blood Pudding among others.