Heatwave Day 42

Another day with extraordinarily little to pee. Yes, I said it. Little pee. The heat is so unbearable. It is like the sun has inched closer to the planet. Everything is covered in a thick coat of dust. The water table is next to nonexistent, even in this coastal town. It has been twelve days straight without any rain. The last rain we had was a quarter of an inch, and it dried up before it even had a chance to soak into the ground. It’s a wonder if any of the infants of this generation will know what mud is- or rain or hailstorms, for that matter.

Animals have been abandoned by their owners and many perish alongside the roadways, in the woods edge, and near dried up ponds. No one has gone fishing in a month. The stench of dead fish and frogs was unbearable too. That was a month ago that we had the Great Stench. Now they’re all just fur and bones. No one from years past would have believed this heatwave. A heatwave that has lasted for six weeks. The weather announcers say: “There must be relief coming, but for today… nothing.” every single day. It is so hot you can cook an egg anywhere(that is if you can find a live chicken that is willing and able to lay an egg.) You can boil water, if you can find any, just by sitting it in a pot in the sun-but no one is intentionally going to waste their water that way. The shelves in the supermarkets have all sold out of every beverage imaginable. Not one bottle of anything-Sprite, Coke, root beer, seltzer water, even those terrible sugar free fruity flavored waters.

The roads are so hot the tires are melting off cars and sticking to driveways. Toilet flushing was being monitored before it got too bad. Kitchens are closed until nightfall, that’s if they have any water and beverages left to cook with and serve(and no one makes soup anymore). People took to covering their rooftops with any shiny material to combat the sun’s rays at week two. There are people who tried gluing coins to their roof once the metal roofing facilities shut down, but no glue holds up to the scorching heat. They finally realized there had to be a framework of sorts put in place to keep the pennies or nickels or quarters on the roof so they wouldn’t slide off due to lack of adhesive. Then, the heat became so intense the shingles themselves melted. Great “shingleslides” occurred at people’s homes; it looked like miniature volcanic mudslides on every roof. That was weeks three and four.

No one wears suits and ties or bras anymore. If the air conditioners don’t give out completely they still do very little to sway the heat. The heat is our harsh master. No creed, socio-economic class or race or gender is exempt from this “tropics on steroids” heatwave. Even spiders have curled up and died halfway through web weaving. Scientists have been repeatedly baffled. All reproduction is virtually nonexistent. Mud dwelling animals have become obsolete. There are rumors of underground pockets- a systematic placement of bunkers each one called an oasis. They are supposedly under government control, at least what is left of government control. Each day the powers that be lose a little more control. People want relief and are at their wits end as to how to get it.

At first it was “conserve your water, don’t water the grass or wash your car”. Then, it was low water pressure and people began to complain to the water treatment facilities. After that it was a lack of papers, notebook, and toilet paper- huge factory processes that require lots of water- that began to shut down. Those people were roaming around without jobs. Then people began raiding stores for water from the water fountains and for the shelved beverages. As if the lack of jobs wasn’t bad enough, chaos continued as people started vigilante movements to disperse water from water treatment plants and “big bosses” took to the water towers across the country to be in control of the lifegiving stuff. Some people, initially, before everything dried to a crisp, would suck water out of leaves and mosses. That resulted in a huge amount of sickness and death, that was about week three or so.

Now we are at the end of the sixth week. Day 42. Let me tell you things are desperate. People are fighting over containers of urine, it’s that bad. If there isn’t any relief soon I am afraid there will be no one left to fight over anything. I have never seen an entire country turn to sand right before my very eyes. We had influxes of people from the inland to the coastal areas hoping for relief. The ocean is almost too warm to harvest. So, today the government begins the act of ocean harvesting in full swing. If we wait any longer there will be less ocean to work with. All the top scientists have been literally panting their way through fabrication processes to create the best machines to purify ocean water in the past month. New water treatment plants were built by simply taking over large chain stores and revamping them as water processing facilities, especially the ones nearest beaches. The entire military is in on guarding these facilities in order to keep some semblance of order and to distribute water equally.

 When the Great Lakes dried to a crisp and archaeologists began looking at the leftover debris, it was discovered that there were several small pyramids under the lakes. That is how this heat wave has changed our world, turned things inside out. The very ice caps are now gone. There are no more freezing cold fronts from the north anymore. There is no freezing Siberia. Now people are praying for hurricanes to hit them. No one ever dreamed it would come to this. The last hurricane we had was a number seven on the scale. That too changed the face of our coastal towns. There are no waterfalls, there are a few trickles left in the more interior parts of the country-at least that’s what is rumored.

Day 42 will hopefully be the day-the day of rain.