Heatwave + other stories

I’ve been in the process of editing another story I made years ago. I was toying with the idea of having the main character in that story start having prophecies about the end of the world, a call back to a short story I wrote in college but never fully finished.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about different ways a world could end, the most obvious being the coming climate apocalypse. I sort of had this rough idea of a heatwave moving through Texas after listening to Heat Wave by Snail Mail, the idea of a sickly and sticky sort of love stuck with me. Anyway, this isn’t a full story, sort of like a brain dump that I felt like getting out for the hell of it.

Heatwave

The heatwave came through in late July, scorching everything it touched.

I wasn’t doing much. Lingering around and waiting for winter.

In the afternoon I’d go over to his house and lay shirtless on the floor; fighting off the heat with the brief bursts of cool air from the oscillating fan he bought early in the season.

His old cat would lay next to me: panting and whining, getting up to drink from her bowl before collapsing on my stomach. He would pace around sweeping the floors and sweating, doing arm curls facing the mirror, texting men on Grindr, and getting bored midway through.

Everyone went out at night. Under the cool blanket of the dark, the city sprang back to life. Bars filled up, and coffee shops poured double-shot espressos to professionals in damp white shirts whose employers just implemented new “nights only” hours.

Sometimes, on a weeknight, we would walk the winding trail that traced the river. There we would join the masses of sweaty bodies lumbering along the river, muttering about the heatwave, how it was expanding outward across the nation, enveloping everything in an oppressive layer of sticky sweat.

We were all waiting for winter.

I made plans to move up to the Northwest to serve as an assistant to an art curator who lived in a suburb outside of Seattle. The heat had yet to reach that far north—though some days were hotter than normal.

He was staying here and moving into a three-bedroom house in a quaint little neighborhood with the redhead.

We met the redhead in a club on a sweltering Saturday, just at the start of the heatwave. He was big but shorter than me. Drunkenly the two of them had made out, stumbled back to his house, had sex, and spent the morning fighting the worst headaches of their lives and falling in love.

I went home early. The lights and crowds made me dizzy and disoriented. When I came over the next day, the redhead was just leaving. I didn’t care too much when he told me. I was leaving anyways. Plus, this was nothing new. There had been other redheads before and there would be redheads after this one. I spent my time reading headlines about the heatwave and searching for apartments.

Besides, I wasn’t much for long-term entanglement and knew that eventually, he would break up with me. We weren’t a lifetime pairing.

He asked me to forgive him and I said “Sure, there isn’t anything to forgive.”

We were two people who met up and had sex. We hung out on the weekdays and spent our days playing video games or watching reality TV. Did the types of things you did when you were young and just starting to understand how to love.

Years from now we would live as strangers, each of us carrying some vestige of the other tightly in our chest. He would maybe still be with the redhead and I’d be with the teacher: a six-foot hairy man I’d meet at a coffee shop in Seattle who unfortunately taught Dante to checked out high school seniors.

After he told me about the redhead we had sex and laid next to each other in bed, feeling slightly faint. He asked me “not to go,” but I pretended not to hear him.

In August the heatwave passed and I packed my belongings into my truck and took off to the North, past the Texas desert, tracing the coast of California until it opened up and spit me out deep into the Northwest.

Marfa

My car broke down in Marfa. It took three days to fix. Finding a hotel room was easy. After the heatwave, nobody wanted to travel this far west so the roads were empty, and the asphalt cracked: thick groves traced deep into the ground.

I came here once before. We stopped in and spent a day or two here after going to Big Bend state park. My brother had lived here once too, long ago before he got an important job in journalism and moved to D.C. to cover the coming climate apocalypse.

Mostly I bummed around the hotel room. Most places were closed. I got drunk at night and hooked up with the only other gay man for miles. In the morning, he made me a coffee—hot and black—before driving me to the auto shop to pick up my car.

I wished him well and he told me how he was planning a move to Chicago, to be with his first love from college. How he had sold all of his belongings before coming out to west Texas one last time.

“I was born in Texas,” he said. “And I spent most of my life moving from city to city. I stayed in Marfa the longest, maybe out of pride, maybe out of depression. But when the heatwave hit I knew I had to go somewhere else. Matt was my first love, we met in college on a hookup app. I broke up with him suddenly and cruelly because I was afraid of being stuck with someone. He moved to Chicago and we hooked up again when I went to visit a few years ago. When he texted me it wasn’t to win me back.

He wanted to make sure I was okay, he had read in the news about all the people dying. We caught up. I couldn’t move for weeks. The planes were all grounded. I spent the time playing old records and texting him. Facetiming in the morning. Watching movies together at night. We both think the end is coming soon. The storms in New York? The blizzard in Minneapolis that lasted a season? I’m not religious but man all the bugs are dying, and the birds are falling out of the sky. Everything is happening all at once.

I wanted to be with someone I loved before we died. I want to die being loved. Feeling love. Not miles from any gay man, you know?”

I told him I did and wished him luck. Stepped out of his car, paid the mechanic, and continued my drive up north.

Another story

Halfway through the trip, my AC broke. I drove up the coast with the windows rolled down, chomping ice chips and dabbing my forehead with a wet washcloth. Somewhere in the delirium of sea air and traffic congestion, I started thinking about the other men I had loved. Their faces and stories were blurring together: the dropout, the burnout, the blonde, him, the teacher—or had I loved him yet?

I remembered driving into San Antonio for a date. Visiting a museum in Dallas. Narrowly avoiding someone’s dormmate in college. A picnic on the hottest day in the summer. Had that happened or was that yet to happen? It was hotter every summer. Soon the heat would be catastrophic. The ice would melt, and the oceans would rise. The collapse is inevitable. The future incomprehensible.

Somewhere in Chicago old flames would reignite. In Austin, he and the redhead would be plunged into darkness as the grid failed and never recovered. In Seattle, hundreds would die. But that was yet to come, that was another story.