What happened to that burning smell...?
Issue #368 Keith’s SciFi Musings August 20, 2023
Woke up this morning. Same as I woke up yesterday morning and the morning before that. Mornings going back 45 years. And for the past 15 years those mornings have always been the same; get out of bed, brush my teeth, eat breakfast, put on my clothes, open the front door, step outside, smell Canada burning, close the front door, get in my car which is in the driveway, and go to work.
And actually, when I think about it, I can remember the smells of Canada burning for close to 40 years. It’s just always been there, like the sky. When my parents were alive they used to talk about what the air was like without the smell of smoke, how you could hike way up in the mountains, “and the air would be so crisp and clear it would cleanse your senses,” my Mom once said. Honestly, even though I smiled and said “Wow,” I thought she was probably lying. Well, not lying actually. More like a fake memory that comes from what happens when you wish something was a certain way so badly that it just becomes the way it was - but only in your mind. Because I just couldn’t imagine any other kind of smell.
Until this morning. Everything was the same until I stepped outside; I woke up, I got out of bed, I brushed my teeth, I ate breakfast, I put on my clothes, I opened the front door, I stepped outside…
And the smell was gone. I forgot to close my door, and I never made it to my car. If I had gone to work, I don’t think anyone else would have been there. Because everyone was just standing in their driveways looking up at something we had never seen before; a patch of blue sky. Not everywhere, but just here and there, surrounded by the yellowish brown that we had grown to believe was normal.
“One day you’ll see I wasn’t lying,” my mother said to me before she died.
I nodded, holding her hand, wanting to believe. Now I didn’t know what to believe, so I asked my neighbor, who was holding his briefcase and looked almost scared.
“They’re saying on the news that the last fire burned out in Canada. It’s all gone. The same thing apparently happened to California.”
“Mom, I…”
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