ST3.9 | "Fire Season"

PROMPT: September is smack dab in the middle of Atlantic hurricane season, and the planet is actively trying to kill us all. This month for Stone’s Throw, give us stories of the Earth in revolt. Hundred year storms every other month. Flash flooding. Tornados. Fire-nados. Bee-nados. Shark-nados. How do your characters cope? And do some of them see opportunity in the face of disaster?

FIRE SEASON

by S. B. Nolen

Each year, fire season starts a little earlier on the dry side of the Cascade Range. It’s only June, but the dim mountains are already half-hidden by yellow haze; fires that have smoldered deep in the forest duff are breaking out.

Lena sits at the worn kitchen table, alone, watching the sweat on her arms evaporate almost before it appears. The dishes are done and put away, the cast-iron pan back in its place on the stove. Scrubbed with salt and carefully dried to prevent rust. Just as Mark likes it.

She wonders where he is now, the way a pocket mouse listens, immobile, for the silence of an owl.

The little house out in the high desert east of Bend had been Mark’s idea, back when he’d lured her away from the rain, from the cold gray winters with promises of year-round sunshine. A gift, he said, an escape from the city. “You can have horses again,” he said. “You’ll love the quiet. You’ll be able to concentrate on your writing.”

And she did love it, at first. The horses carried her away and away through the desert, where she filled her lungs with the tang of sagebrush, her eyes with endless sky, the western mountains—sleeping volcanoes rising dark blue or snow-covered. Long nights full of shooting stars and love. The poems flowed from her like water after a thunderstorm. Back when fire season was three or four weeks at the end of summer—just until the autumn rains swept in.

But gradually, things dried up. Snowpack. Autumn rains. Thunderstorms, too—those intermittent light and sound shows prized for shifting the dial from broiling to cool. Now, the rumbling clouds are just a source of dread, of 50,000-degree sparks waiting to ignite the landscape in purifying flame.

The paint on the little house peels in long strips; bare wood shows gray like dirty underwear beneath. At thirty-four, Lena is showing wear, too. The dark hair, prematurely streaked with silver like her mother’s, hangs limp over her shoulders. Crevices like empty creek beds line her hands. There, the ghost of a bruise, yellowed with time; another, darker, fresher, lurks beneath a sleeve. She hasn’t written much—anything—for a while.

Drifting smoke turns the sun a dull orange, the incense of burning sage slips around the door, and her mother is there, across the table, worry etched in her tired face. Lena sees her more frequently these days, echoes of their conversations a tune stuck in her head.

Lena picks up her cup and sighs. “Don’t start.” She picks at a nail, broken and dirty.

“You know the signs: Time to get out.”

“Just a shift in the wind. Nothing I have to do anything about.”

“Ain’t talking about the fires.”

Lena feels the impatience in her mother’s voice, the hint of desperation. Thoughts swirl, conceal, reveal a dull certainty lurking deep in her belly. She does know the signs. Time to run.

But where? Her friends have faded away out here with no Internet, cell phones a joke. The meetups with women she knows in Portland or Eugene never materialized. Something always came up; Mark would take off and leave her to care for the horses. Or her bruises would still be too fresh, too obvious, too hard to explain away to concerned faces.

She tries to resist the acrid prickle of smoke in the back of her throat, coughs.

“Don’t make my mistake, baby. Any more of them, anyways.”

“Your mistakes were your own, Mom.” Lena’s cup clatters down, empty. “Nothing to do with me.”

“Mm hm.”

The horses add their nervous whinnying to the voices in Lena’s head. A kick rattles the paddock fence. She breathes in their panic; it joins her own in a rush up her spine. Time to run.

The radio crackles. An announcer’s voice pierces the static: Level 3 evacuation, imminent danger, leave now—

She clicks the radio off. Stands too quickly, the empty room spinning. Three days since Mark stormed off, but the wildfire will bring him back. Any time now.

The fire pushes a tawny mass of smoke ahead of itself, rolling off the mountains, filling the valley, beating silently against the window. A flame shoots up, half a mile away. Then another, closer, as scattered trees catch wind-born embers and torch. Lines of fire snake through dry grass. Closer.

A hot draft touches her face, brings a low hum that throbs against her chest, electrifying the hair on her neck.

His truck is in the drive, oversized tires spitting gravel, shards of rock striking the window. Engine idling, growling, panting, eager to break the leash and be gone.

Her mother’s voice, soft in her ear. “Run.”

She hears the truck door slam. Hears the whiskey in his voice as he shouts her name. Hears his steps on the porch.

Too late, she looks for a hole to bolt through. Her gaze snags on the knife in the drainer.

Too late. Anger radiates from him as he stands in the doorway; she feels its heat on her face.

“Lena! What the fuck? Didn’t you hear? They’re evacuating us. Level 3!” He snaps on the radio, but a country song slides out: love is gone, too bad, so sad. “Christ, woman. Look outside!”

Hot wind swirls flakes of ash past the window, like dying moths.

Lena stumbles to the sink, slowly rinses out her coffee cup. Considers the knife, rejects it. Too dull. He’d told her to sharpen it, but she’d forgotten. His cast-iron pan sits there on the stove, though. She reaches for it, feels the weight as she lifts.

“You stupid bitch!” He grabs her arm.

The bruise he put there three days ago sings out, and she twists toward him; the heavy pan slams into the side of his head with the force of years.

Shocked into silence, he slides to the floor. Blood spatters the uneven boards. “Lena—”

But she’s already moving. Out through falling embers to open the gate for the frantic horses. “Run!” she whispers.

She unleashes the truck, and it leaps forward. Galloping horses fly down the road ahead, leading her away and away. In the rearview, she sees Mark’s face at the door, a wall of flame just behind, then shifts her gaze to the road ahead.

Gravel meets asphalt, and she shudders to a stop. Which way to go when the whole world is burning? She feels the heat on the back of her neck as the truck’s radio oozes that same country song: too bad, so sad.

Lena smiles, clicks off the radio, and spins the wheel.

S. B. NOLEN (on Bluesky: @sbnolen.bsky.social; on Substack: https://sunolen.substack.com/) is a writer and photographer living in a multigenerational, multispecies household on the beautiful Kitsap Penninsula. After years of studying and writing about identity and motivation in social context, she now writes stories of women making space for themselves in the world. It’s way more fun. Her work has appeared in Circle of Seasons and Stone’s Throw.