Attention

I’ve never believed any of it.

The air is hot and sticky, and it whirls leaves around my feet. There are decorations everywhere, and this is the first time Mom let me dress up and go trick-or-treating alone. Of course, I am not alone. We scavenge our street for sweets, and then we move over, and we don’t stop until late at night.

The nights are light here. When I was choosing where to go for college, it never occurred to me that this place, just a couple hours’ drive away, was that far North. It doesn’t snow here, even though it does at home.

When we graduate, the shop at the university doesn’t sell hoodies anymore. I am not upset—I was never a fan of hoodies or college stores, to begin with—but Margaret notices. She is a fashion designer and hates hoodies with school names on them more than anything in the world.

We don’t see much need to leave the town even after most of our friends have gone: The weather is great, the people are alright and, for the majority, college students, and we both have a job here.

This year the cicadas are supposed to come out from underground, Margaret says. They do it every seventeen years! A kid at Margaret’s magazine rips off his ears a few months later, and we don’t move because the cicadas won’t come back for another two decades.

We get a cat. Mom used to say that this is step one to getting a child, and I’m excited.

When we visit my home town, the air is hot and sticky, and so is everything else. Margaret asks my parents why they don’t plant some trees in the backyard—you can buy them adolescent and even adult now—and Mom says she’s afraid of moths. They toppled a tree one yard over last summer. Dad coughs a dry cough, and the wind carries it away. Allergies, he smiles.

Next winter, a helicopter lands in their yard to dig them out of five feet of snow that has accumulated over the night. The cat gets pregnant, and we do, too.

We name her Amelie.

She spends summers with my parents and draws comics about monster insects while we try to work early in the morning and late at night to nap the heat away. She is back at our place for the rest of the year, and she doesn’t know winter.

In school, she draws insects in biology classes and reads Lovecraft, and dates a boy that neither of us likes. The boy leaves her pregnant, Amelie doesn’t leave it. Her insects grow claws and nasty tentacles. She goes off to nursing school after graduation, which none of us have expected. Not arts? I ask. Not zoology? Margaret asks. No, Amelie says. 

The girl stays with us. She’s two years old the year the cicadas come back, and we finally move away. 

There’s climate action all over the world when she goes to school as if there’s nothing else to worry about. Margaret listens to everything the girl says, smiles, and nods, and encourages it. I think you’re giving her too much freedom with hobbies, I say. She glares at me and asks if I’m projecting Amelie on her daughter.

Amelie graduates. I think; she stops texting a few months into her first year, and we don’t hear from her after that, and the next year my Dad dies of lung cancer, and there’s no one to warn Mom when a fire breaks out in the middle of the day and swallows the area. There’s nowhere we can move to run from this tragedy.

The girl has few hobbies. I don’t see a point, she says, I might not grow up to have a future. What is that supposed to mean? Margaret asks. You kids take everything too seriously, I say. The girl scoffs and doesn’t talk to us for the rest of the day.

The fire that took Mom is a yearly occurrence. It sweeps through borders, taking land, livestock, and lives, and the girl volunteers to help even though she’s twelve years old and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near an open fire. There’s too much going on, and no one keeps track, and soon we have to evacuate, too, and there’s no time to worry about appropriate teen behavior anymore.

Remember I told you about climate change? She asks, How are you not paying attention?

She’s in the hospital in thirteen months. The doctor asks, Do you live in a hotspot or something? We don’t. How has she inhaled so much smoke then? We know what she has been doing. We don’t know how there’s still so much fire when it clearly happens every year.

It would be far too expensive to attempt to stop it before it burns out, a politician says. That year, thousands die of carbon dioxide poisoning. That year, the girl is diagnosed with lung cancer.

It doesn’t stop her so we do. We agree to listen if she agrees to volunteer remotely, and she agrees to that when we agree to donate. She agrees to take her treatments, even though it’s painful, and her hair falls out, and she has to miss school if we agree to drive her to protests if she agrees to only stay for a few hours and not overexert herself. It’s a lot of screaming and compromising. It’s a lot of, I don’t have a future, and a lot of, Well, now you don’t, and a lot of tears. The girl never cries.

I start to pay attention. No one tells me it’s too late now. I see the fires in Siberia, Australia, States; I see the melting glaciers, and I see the abundance of snow. I see sick children and dying adults, and extinct species, and novel viruses, and I think,

But it has always been, no?

She’s been talking about it for as long as I’ve lived, and longer, and I’ve never listened. And now her lungs are burning up, and she has no hair left, and no strength to talk anymore, so she has children talk for her and lose hair with her, and I’ve never believed any of it.