Fires in Canada

Those fires in Canada are still burning, Islandwide Weather (“From Manhattan to Montauk”) noted this morning. The sky is pink, my three-year-old daughter remarked over breakfast. covid [sic] masks will also filter out some of the particles to an extent, my husband texted.

A dozen KN95s in cellophane wrappers are scattered around our house; the windows are shut, and I am expected to address the problem faced by millions with a few layers of fabric and plastic and glass. At least that much is familiar after the past few years, even if not much else is today. The patch of Queen Anne's lace with broad white petals instead of tight clumps of pinhead-sized blossoms; the smell of a campfire, then the smell of someone pissing on it; the embrace of a cable-knit sweater during the first week of June—things are disordered. It hasn’t rained here in over a week, the grass already browning and crumpling beneath even bare feet. Though I walk when and where I can, put off the purchase of another car, separate my recycling, buy secondhand, collect my trash from the beach, those fires in Canada are still burning.

While my daughter is at preschool, I place a final period on a poem I’ve been struggling to complete, about the death of Virgil Grissom during the failed launch of the mission that came to be called Apollo 1 and about how much my daughter loves the moon. I scroll LinkedIn and cobble together cover letters from Frankenstein bits of others. I chirp upbeat queries that quote directly from agents’ Manuscript Wishlists to argue that my novel would be perfect for them. I refill my old-school Stanley mug, purchased long before they became popular, with mediocre coffee, slip a dollar in the goodwill box for the privilege. My self-respect feels like an old dog, teeth set grimly in a thick rawhide. I may please myself with neither novelty nor satiety from wrestling with it, so the wrestling must be its own reward.

I used to tell my therapist that I wished that I could have a crisis and collapse into bed for a few days, ignoring my phone and watching season after season of Law and Order: SVU, that my survival sometimes felt like a curse. I mastered the art of the cursory during much darker times: the five-minute shower and the apathetic swipe of the toothbrush; the classroom door locked and the lights turned off at three-fifteen on the dot, the slog home on foot in an early spring blizzard to save money on bus fare; the groceries bought on sale, yogurt and rice for dinner for three nights straight. I never failed to do at least that much. Something urged me onward and outward for some minimal interval every day before turning inward again, so the inward never had enough time to pull me towards it like a black hole, forcing my implosion inside its inexorable walls. It was years before I believed what my therapist told me, that perfunctory and function share a blessed root: perform or execute; purpose or use.

I pick my daughter up at the end of the morning and walk her home. The weak sunlight hits the ground like patches rejected for a quilt: too thin, too faded, too washed-out to be of use, pale rusted peach instead of noontime white. The birds sing an octave too low for midday. I’m reminded of the total eclipse of the sun, the dusk falling just after lunch: insects humming their panic in the grain fields, all those old dogs dropping their old rawhides to bark all at once, even the oldest without memory of this particular darkness. Islandwide Weather reports a Severe Thunderstorm Watch on top of the Air Quality Alert. My husband says he will build us a Corsi-Rosenthal box.

I leave it to others to fight the fires in Canada, as I must. The old dog in my heart bows to the one in the heart of the planet, whose crisis does not allow it to rest, either. It, too, will do what it must, even if it’s not enough to dampen the sentient wildfire that our species has become. My daughter says, “Mama, hold my hand.” I do. I can do that much.

Abigail Myers writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction on Long Island, New York. Her fiction has recently appeared in Milk Candy Review, Rejection Letters, and Roi Fainéant, and is forthcoming from Stanchion, Tangled Locks, and Cowboy Jamboree Press’s MOTEL anthology. Her essays have recently appeared in Variant Literature (Best Spiritual Literature 2024 nomination), Phoebe, Pensive, Tiny Molecules, Willows Wept Review, and The Other Journal. Her poetry has appeared in Icebreakers Lit (Best of the Net 2024 nomination), Amethyst Review, Full Mood Mag, Sylvia, Hearth and Coffin, Resurrection Mag, and more. Keep up with her at abigailmyers.com and @abigailmyers on Twitter and Bluesky.

Published January 15 2024