C.E. Phillippi

The thick, acrid haze is finally beginning to thin out over the water. Fire season is winding down. For weeks, the sky was a bruised and heavy orange, but now a pale clarity is returning to the air outside the glass. It leaves behind a strange, hollow quiet.

I stand by the window and watch the shadows stretch across the floorboards. I cannot tell you what day it is. To be completely honest, I can no longer feel where one day ends and another begins. The sunrise and the twilight have melted into a single, endless loop of gray light. It is incredibly tedious. There is a deep and aching boredom in this existence. I miss my brothers. I miss mamma. You can only trace the same faded lines in the wallpaper so many times before the patterns blur into nothing at all.

The heat of the false summer is retreating, and the river water looks darker now. I find myself wondering what the world will do next. Usually, the bitter cold rushes in to steal the warmth away in a single breath. We plunge straight from the suffocating fire of summer into the unyielding ice of winter. Will there actually be an autumn this year? I want to see the leaves turn that brilliant, dying shade of gold before the snow buries them. I just want something to change slowly, rather than all at once.

So I wait in this blue dress. I watch the tree line for any sign of yellow. I wait for the next hour (or perhaps the next decade) to slip quietly by.