CYCLONE RECONNAISSANCE
Outside the supermarket, the homeless are selling day old copies of Street Sense for a dollar. Some nonprofit van drops them off in twine-tied bales as the sun rises. Wemby buys one every morning from Max, who looks a little like Willie Nelson. Wemby’s never said that out loud; he can’t be sure it would be taken as a compliment. Wemby takes his paper every morning and a canned espresso drink, whatever chocolate flavor is available in the little refrigerators nearest the checkout line, and sits and reads and drinks on the patio outside. The thin black metal is already hot when he sits down these days, even this early in the summer. The Mexican restaurant-slash-bowling alley is unionizing, or at least the waitresses are. Unclear if the offer has been extended to the dishwashers to join, Wemby reads.
In the Pacific Ocean, there’s a floating island of hooks and plastic rings and buoys and nets and fishing line and styrofoam. Everyone hates it but the algae and the little fish that hide in its shade. An army of turtles is doing cyclone reconnaissance, Wemby reads. Scientists drag them up onto boats and hook beeping tags that talk to satellites under the neck of their shells. Sometimes, a researcher will track down one of the turtles to check on it and find just a shell floating in the ocean. Wemby imagines the turtle freed of its shell and its tracker swimming naked. But he knows all it means is that the turtle is dead and eaten. He wonders if the turtles would like what they’re doing, helping humans avoid the effects of storms, if they could understand what the tags were for. Wemby wonders if the turtles would want to help if they had the power to choose. He thinks: it would be nice if they’d choose to help us. He thinks: they’d probably tell us to fix our own fucking messes, and then go eat a squid and a plastic bag.
Wemby picks up trash in the crosswalk at the top of the hill that flattens into Main Street. There’s no street sweepers in the summer. It’s too dry. Everything blows away into the woods that outline the highways or into the eddies beneath the dammed river before it can gather anywhere. He walks to the pizza place next to his ex-wife’s realty office. The pizza place always has the news on at midday and Wemby likes to sit and watch and have a slice and a mug full of beer. It’s her third or fourth location in the last ten years. She hates to renew a lease, he knows. The kids are grown but she still sends him brochures on coparenting every once in a while. Paragraphs circled in Sharpie, as if to say: this is what you didn’t do, dummy.
On the television above the bar, a wildfire is ripping through the forests on the east side of the Rockies. It’s a live shot but it looks like nighttime. The smoke is orange and the sky is orange and the trees are burning orange and the painted lines on the side of the road that mark the shoulder are speckled with orange embers. Clods of soil and singed branch. If it was a movie, it wouldn’t look realistic, Wemby thinks. You would say: that’s not what a fire looks like! The reporter is coughing and the bartender says it seems like a performance, like the way that hurricanes make men tie themselves to palm trees and mailboxes in preparation for a moment where they might look heroic.
“Why would you even put yourself there?” says the bartender.
“Shouldn’t they all be getting away?” says Wemby.
“I’d pick everything up and run,” the bartender agrees. “I wouldn’t even grab my kids. I’d be out of there. Every man for himself.”
“These are never-before-seen images coming from Colorado,” says the anchor. They’ve put the reporter and the fire in a little box on the bottom of the screen. The fire is contained there.
“This looks like every other fire,” says the bartender, and changes the channel. Wemby and the bartender sit and watch WNBA highlights and recaps of the Red Sox games and speculation on the future of the sports world. Broadcasting rights for men’s basketball and the Olympics and hockey are all expiring. A lockout is coming, a strike is coming, someone’s going to do something rash. One guest says the future of all sports everywhere is in doubt. One guest says these things are cyclical. Someone always figures it out, all sides come together and make a deal. There’s too much at stake. Someone will take care of it all.
On his way home, Wemby passes the Mexican restaurant-slash-bowling alley. They’ve canceled Happy Hour with a message on a folding blackboard propped on the sidewalk. Wemby looks through the window. The kitchen manager is training fifteen new waitresses all at once. They fired all the old ones, a woman at the crosswalk tells him. She was there to peer inside, too.
“Fuck around and find out,” the woman says, and pushes a little cart full of tomatoes and Brussel sprouts and olive oil into the road. Wemby wonders who she thought was fucking around and who was finding out. The first mosquitoes of the early evening are just coming out. Wemby remembers when his mother would talk about the DDT truck coming around and spraying for mosquitoes.
“You’d run after the mosquito man and play in the fog!” she’d say. “It was something to do!”
Wemby’s house is quiet when he gets back. Cat yawns from her seat on the windowsill. She’s been watching birds and napping, Wemby knows. She’s not the kind that wants to run or play or go outside or hunt mice or any of that. She’s just content on the sill, behind the glass and screen. Wemby still has an answering machine at home and sees that he’s missed a call from Jake. He dials Jake’s number from the house phone and sits in the kitchen in front of the stove while it rings. The pantry is full. He’ll stare until something presents itself as a full meal. He’s not a meal prepper, not someone with a dinner calendar.
“Missed you earlier, figured you were out,” Jake says when he picks up. “I got to remember that you’re always out and about. Busy day?”
“Not really,” says Wemby. He’ll make rice and beans, he decides. Throw it all in a pot and let it sit. It practically cooks itself. As long as you keep the lid on and don’t poke at it too much. “I was just out. There wasn’t anything real to do.”
Sam Milligan (he/him) writes when he isn't fishing his cats out of the kitchen sink or struggling to find on-street parking. He's got his chocolate chip cookie recipe memorized. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Many Nice Donkeys, Rejection Letters, Malarkey Books, Roi Fainéant, and elsewhere. He is @sawmilligan on Twitter.
