a million things snapping and burning

When I walk outside, I see the moon. It is a pumpkin orange. Spooky pretty, and you can barely smell the smoke in the air. The ash on my car looks like light snow. All apparitions of peace.

I have to talk it through in my head: the moon does not always look like this, it is not always this color. And this is not peace, this is a million things snapping and burning.

I’ve been watching the expressions of people on the streets. Inevitably they are looking at the clouds of smoke. It’s the same-ness of their faces, despite age or race or station, that strikes me. The same look, as if they are seeing God in those clouds. It’s awe, and it’s so interesting that awe looks the same on everybody.

The clouds look Biblical and that makes me sad. When I close my eyes at night and try to think of God, the first thing is the pillar of glowing smoke rising over my mountains. It could easily destroy and displace all of us. I don’t want that to be what I see. It just is.

In the morning I’m like a cat—arching everything about me, skiddish, whimpering and complaining. I am staying with my parents; I left my window open up in Sierra Madre and breathed the smoke all night, and it gave me a fever of 102. I’m better now, just an old-woman cough left over.

I snap about 10 times, at everyone, before I apologize. I get this way when things are out of my control. We can’t see the sun because of the smoke, and nobody, not the weatherman, not the news anchors who enthusiastically interview evacuee after evacuee, can tell us when it will change.

But by afternoon we don’t even look up, it’s just a sort of hot fog that goes unnoticed. At school, everyone is hanging up bulletin boards and talking about summer and not one person mentions the fires, so I don’t either, because it seems too obvious, like stating the day of the week.

And at night Dad says he really wants to get better, in a voice that sounds like his old voice, almost crying. I immediately believe him, with my whole heart, which makes everyone, but mostly me, immediately angry.

That’s when I walk outside and look at the moon, which is pumpkin orange. Glitter Halloween greeting-card orange. And the smoke makes me a little sleepy and everything is so still. And I have to talk through in my head, actually speak to myself. This is not the moon. This is not the sky.