The sun is a rumor…
The sun is a rumor, she thinks, standing at the window that once showed her the television tower, the same window where her grandmother stood watching the Wall go up, the same window that now shows only silted sky, and she wonders if every generation has its own opacity, its own way of not seeing.
The pills for climate inflected prose sit in their capsules on the kitchen table—the same table where her mother sorted ration cards, where she herself once sorted love letters, where now she sorts emergency broadcasts by date, by severity, by the particular taste of ash they describe.
Stay and help versus flee.
But this is the wrong question, has always been the wrong question, like asking whether to love the dying or the dead, whether to document the disappearing or disappear into the documentation. Her grandmother stayed through the bombing. Her mother stayed through the Wall. She stays through the smoke. Each staying is different. Each staying is the same.
The actors at their lecterns under flashing lights are reading Dense factual footnotes, but she knows—as her body knows the weight of waiting, as her lungs know the weight of breathing—that facts are only the skeleton. The flesh is in the Primary Sensorium: smell and taste of ash that connects this moment to every burning, every ending, every beginning that rises from destruction.
In the desk drawer—the desk that was her father's, that was nobody's, that was the state's, that is hers—she keeps the TikTok transcripts next to the senate hearing transcripts next to her grandmother's diary from 1945. Lack of drama, abundance of drama, the drama of lack. All of it the same story told in different frequencies.
Displacement particulate memory erodes.
Like the way she can no longer remember his face without photographs, can no longer remember clean air without longing, can no longer remember the Wall without nostalgia for its clarity. At least a wall was visible. This atmospheric threat has no checkpoints, no guards, only the slow suffocation of everything once taken for granted.
She writes: Record versus forget—but recording is forgetting, forgetting is recording, each act of memory an act of transformation. The musicians flee as a megafire darkens a western sky, and she thinks of the orchestra that played while Dresden burned, thinks of the pianist who kept playing while the Wall fell, thinks of all the music that continues despite, because of, through.
Time will not be the driving engine of any plot.
Time hiccups. She is twenty-five meeting him at the theater. She is fifty-five breathing through a T-shirt. She is not yet born. She is already dead. The smoke makes all moments simultaneous, like the moment when the Wall both existed and didn't, when love both was and wasn't, when the future both approached and receded.
In the margins of her notebook—Syllabus module: pair the story with Fire Weather—she writes the real curriculum: How to breathe each other's breath. How to taste memory in bread. How to love in the time of atmospheric dissolution.
We breathe through T-shirts and lullabies.
The lullabies are her grandmother's, are her mother's, are hers, are no one's. They translate through dust storms that cloak voice notes, each translation a small betrayal, a small salvation. She counts the days, but the days count differently now—not forward but sideways, not linear but layered like sediment, like ash, like the weight of all the stories we tell ourselves about staying.
Love versus duty under toxic skies.
But love is duty, duty is love, the binary dissolves like everything else in this new atmosphere where lineage blurred by dust means she is her grandmother fleeing, her mother staying, herself caught between motion and stillness, between the personal flights of fancy at micro-scale and the Cultural memories of Global systems at macro-scale.
The storm opacity as mentality: this is what interests her. Not the storm as metaphor but as consciousness, as way of being, as the new condition in which all other conditions must be understood. Hope versus cynicism within climate activism—another false binary in a world that demands both, neither, something unnamed that exists in the space between.
She reads the emergency alerts as epistolary forms, as love letters from a dying system to itself. Data feeds structures punctured by human breathing, by the irregular rhythm of hearts that continue despite everything to beat, despite everything to break, despite everything to go on breaking.
Why It Matters.
It doesn't. It does. It's the only thing that—
The sentence never completes, can never complete, like the love that ended but didn't end, like the country that disappeared but remains, like the air that's unbreathable but breathed. She thinks of the prize winners who haven't yet written the storm reports and air-quality alerts as their front and center framework, thinks perhaps the framework must first dissolve before it can be written.
In the end—but there is no end, only this continuous middle, this ongoing meanwhile—she returns to the window. The same window. The different window. The window that frames only what we allow it to frame. Outside, ash drifts like gray snow, like time made visible, like all the words for snow she learned as a child now repurposed for this new precipitation of endings.
Can you still hear us?
The question arrives from everywhere, from nowhere, from the space between frequencies where static meets signal meets silence. She doesn't answer. The answer is in the breathing. The answer is in the staying. The answer is in the way she places one word after another, like placing one foot after another through ruins, through rubble, through whatever comes after the after.
It reads like a—
The sentence fragments, refuses completion, like everything now refuses the completion we once called conclusion, resolution, ending. There are no endings. Only this continuing. Only this breathing through. Only this registration of what is while it still is, before it becomes what was, what might have been, what never could be again.
She closes the notebook. Opens the notebook. Closes it. Opens. This too is a kind of breathing.
Listen, friend, let me tell you about these Dense factual footnotes accumulating in my brain like unpaid medical bills from my last panic attack (American healthcare, what a comedy!). They arrive as hybrid fictional data, part truth, part hallucination—like my dating profile claiming I'm "emotionally available" and "breathes normally."
So here I am, Alternating between maximalist paragraphs about our planetary demise and tweet-length interjections of pure dread. Why? Because that's how we process apocalypse now! Long-form anxiety interrupted by push notifications about new ways we're dying!
Why It Matters, you ask? Everything matters when nothing matters! My therapist charges $350 per session to tell me this is "catastrophic thinking," but have you seen the August Fog Deluge forecast? It reads like a Parable for a Sower if the sower was on Lexapro and had an adjustable-rate mortgage!
Picture this: actors at lecterns under flashing emergency lights, reading Cross Synthesis reports about our doom while I'm in the audience, thinking about my Amazon Subscribe & Save order. Did I remember to reorder the artisanal air filters? The ones that cost more than my grandmother's entire journey from across the ocean?
Primary Sensorium—fancy words for the Smell and taste of ash that pairs so well with my morning oat milk latte (extra shot, because sleeping is for people who believe in futures). The barista writes my name wrong on my cup. Even my name is eroding, like displacement particulate memory!
The Pace Lyrical trip staccato of emergency alerts has become my personal soundtrack. Fragmented consciousness whispering to an Epic mosaic of disaster—it's like stream-of-consciousness had a baby with the Weather Channel and that baby has generalized anxiety disorder!
Atmospheric Threat! Wildfire smoke plume! Dust-storm opacity! These aren't weather events, they're startup names in Silicon Valley! "We're disrupting breathing," says some Stanford dropout, securing Series A funding while Storm cluster heat domes form overhead.
The eternal question: Stay and help versus flee? But flee WHERE? To my ex's apartment with the HEPA filter and the emotional availability of a DMV employee? Record versus forget—I choose both! Recording my panic attacks while forgetting to take my meds!
Radical action versus gradual reform, they debate on CNN while I take the radical action of ordering another air purifier on credit. Personal flights of fancy at micro-scale (like imagining breathable air) clash with Cultural memories of Global systems at macro-scale (like when we had ice caps, remember those?).
My nephew's Syllabus module says pair the story with Fire Weather and Dust and Uninhabitable Earth to triangulate drama. Drama? We're LIVING the drama! Every breath is a three-act structure: inhale (rising action), hold (climax), exhale (denouement/death rattle)!
Feel free to ask for breakdowns and a mood board if you are planning a symposium, the email says. A symposium on breathing! What's next, a conference on blinking? A summit on existing? Actually, I'd attend that. I'd livestream it while popping my pill capsules for climate inflected taste of prose—now available in "Existential Dread" and "Mango Madness" flavors!
Look at them, those musicians flee as a megafire darkens a western sky, their cellos strapped to their backs like refugee children. The scene is broken by emergency alert transcripts on everyone's phones, that sweet dopamine hit of collective doom! It Explores grief and survivor's humor—which in my case is the same thing!
The tension between staying to help versus running for breathable air—story of my love life! "I want to be with you," she said, "but you live in a Superfund site." Fair point! Ash drifts like gray snow, very romantic, if romance had asthma and a payment request for its inhaler!
We breathe through T-shirts and lullabies—the American dream, updated for late-stage capitalism! My mother sings the old songs while dust storms cloak voice notes and translations. "How's the air?" she asks from Florida. "Breathable," I lie, as count the days until the sun is a rumor there behind a silted sky.
Watch how climate policy lurches like me after too much wine at my cousin's wedding! Peppered with bulletins and TikTok transcripts and senate hearing lack of drama—because nothing says "democracy" like watching octogenarians debate physics they don't understand!
Time to redraw now every map we think is finished! Geography is so last century! Now we map by breathability zones! Lens Atmospherics—a haze as moving antagonist, like my ex-mother-in-law but more predictable! This storm opacity as mentality has infected everything!
See how data feeds structures punctured by Epistolary alerts? Love letters from the emergency broadcast system! "Dear Citizen, today's air quality is: FLEE." Romance isn't dead, it's just wheezing!
Love versus duty under toxic skies—every millennial's dating profile! She had a duty to her lung health, I had love for my rent-controlled apartment. Lineage blurred by dust, which explains why I can't tell if that's my grandfather in the old photos or just another bearded man fleeing something!
Hope versus cynicism within climate activism—spoiler alert: cynicism is winning by a landslide! A landslide caused by erosion! Which is caused by—you get it!
Short answer: there is No prize winner who has taken storm reports and air-quality alerts as its front and center framework. Why? Because prize committees breathe filtered air in temperature-controlled rooms! Those exact hurricane motifs and evacuation push notifications remain mostly the domain of nonfiction, as if fiction could compete with this reality!
They want someone to braid extreme weather, smoke, and data into a notable polluted plot. I tried! My novel "Love in the Time of Cholera 2: This Time It's Respiratory" was rejected by thirty-seven agents! They said it was "too depressing," which, granted, yes, but have you LOOKED OUTSIDE?
Salvage the Bones tracks a Gulf Coast Hurricane including Radio advisories and barometric updates—very nice, very literary! Meanwhile, I track my anxiety via Apple Watch while breathing through an Expressive semi abstract mask woven into dialogue: "Mmmph mmph?" means "I love you" now!
This time will not be the driving engine of any plot because time assumes causality and causality assumes a universe that makes sense! Instead, we have Ministry for the Future, Winner of a lethal heat wave—what a prize! Like winning a fatal lottery!
The real style feeds into ozone cyclone intensity blends thrills with metrics—it's data-driven death, very Silicon Valley! An ensemble techno and political saga bewilderment where carbon counts are the new social credit score! Sorry, your emissions are too high to date me!
Maps and aurora are seeping into life as usual. "Usual" doing a lot of heavy lifting here! Like calling my therapist "helpful" or this air "breathable"!
Why it remains as a thin split? Because juries still lean toward interpersonal character led disaster reportage of injustice, colonial extraction instead of making a raw whole spine. They want human drama! As if the planet dying isn't dramatic enough! What, you need a love triangle in the burn unit?
If you need a list, if you're curating a festival around meteorological air quality anxiety—what a festival! Come for the juggernauts, stay because you literally can't breathe outside! Consider small press contenders told in lyric fragments, each fragment a tiny eulogy for breathable air!
As early buzz for climate focused awards—awards! We're giving out awards while the theater is on fire! Very theatrical, very 2025!
Bottom line: await the breakout of an on-screen engine caence. I don't know what "caence" means but it sounds expensive and probably requires a subscription! Right now the closest analogues weave signals into dramas that let alerts run the show, which is perfect because I've outsourced all my emotional responses to push notifications anyway!
We're dealing with disruptions of critical round ups—disrupting the disruptions! It's disruption all the way down! Suggest titles that weave haze and anxiety into speculative literal literature—but isn't all literature speculative now? Speculating on whether we'll exist long enough to finish reading?
So here I sit, refreshing air quality apps with one thumb, texting my therapist with the other, breathing through a shirt that cost more than a ventilator, wondering if this is fiction or nonfiction or just fiction or just non or just—
[EMERGENCY ALERT: YOUR ANXIETY IS SHOWING]
Perfect. Even my phone knows.
Well within limits, they say. Whose limits? What wells?
I need a drink. But the ice caps have melted into my whiskey.
To life! Whatever's left of it!
I stood at the window watching the August Fog Deluge move across the city with something like desire, that particular hunger I knew too well, the way disaster can call to us with its promise of transformation, and I thought of how we are drawn to what unmakes us, how the Dense factual footnotes of our ending accumulate like the hybrid fictional data of any love affair, each measurement a kind of intimacy with our own dissolution.
The Smell and taste of ash entered me—there is no other word for it—entered me as completely as any lover had, filling the spaces between my cells with its particular flavor of ending, and I remembered other invasions, other moments when the boundary between self and world dissolved, though this was different, this was not chosen, or rather it was chosen by our collective refusal to choose differently, our Alternating between maximalist paragraphs of consumption and tweet-length interjections of concern.
Why It Matters, I wrote in my notebook, then crossed it out, then wrote it again, this gesture of assertion and erasure that had become my primary mode, as if meaning itself were something that could only be approached through repetition and denial, like the Pace Lyrical trip staccato of breath through a mask, Fragmented, whispering to an Epic mosaic of loss that was both personal and planetary, each particle of smoke a word in a sentence too vast to parse.
I thought of the actors at lecterns under flashing lights, reading Cross Synthesis reports with the same earnestness I had once brought to reading love letters aloud, that performance of significance we enact when the real has become too large to hold, and I wondered if this too was a kind of desire, this need to make art from catastrophe, to find in the Primary Sensorium of our undoing something like beauty.
The Atmospheric Threat pressed against the windows like a body seeking entrance, the Wildfire smoke plume a kind of presence that demanded recognition, and I found myself thinking of other pressures, other moments when the outside insisted on becoming inside, when the Dust-storm opacity of experience overwhelmed the careful boundaries I had constructed, leaving me exposed to the Storm cluster heat domes of feeling I had tried so hard to avoid.
Stay and help versus flee—but what was flight when the air itself had become unbreathable, when every direction led only to another version of the same predicament, like those moments in love when every choice seems to lead back to the same impossible need, the same Record versus forget that haunts all human connection, the question of what to preserve and what to release into the displacement particulate memory erodes of time.
I watched the musicians flee as a megafire darkens a western sky, their instruments cases like small coffins they carried into exile, and I thought of my own flights, the way I had moved from place to place seeking some impossible purity, some air that hadn't been breathed before, only to find that we carry our contamination with us, that the Personal flights of fancy at micro-scale cannot escape the Cultural memories of Global systems at macro-scale.
The emergency alert transcripts arrived with the regularity of a lover's messages, each one broken by its own urgency, and I read them with the same mixture of dread and anticipation I had once brought to reading texts from someone who was destroying me slowly, beautifully, with the precision of climate policy lurches that pretend to address what they only perpetuate.
We breathe through T-shirts and lullabies, making filters from whatever tenderness remains, and I thought of all the inadequate protections we devise against pain, the way a hand placed over the mouth during sex can feel like both suffocation and salvation, how the dust storms cloak voice notes and translations until communication itself becomes a kind of faith.
Count the days, I told myself, as if enumeration could provide structure to formlessness, but the sun is a rumor there behind a silted sky, and time itself had become unreliable, marked only by the TikTok transcripts that documented our dissolution in real time, each video a senate hearing lack of drama compressed into fifteen seconds of witness.
I thought of how we must redraw now every map we think is finished, how the Lens Atmospherics of our perception shifts with each degree of warming, each haze as moving antagonist that refuses the narrative structures we try to impose, this storm opacity as mentality that makes clear thought impossible even as it demands unprecedented clarity.
The data feeds structures punctured by Epistolary alerts created a new grammar of emergency, and I found myself thinking of other grammars, other ways language fails us at the precise moment we need it most, how Love versus duty under toxic skies becomes not a choice but a condition, like the lineage blurred by dust that makes us all orphans of the same dying system.
Hope versus cynicism within climate activism—but these were the wrong terms, I knew, as wrong as asking whether one loved or didn't love, as if such binaries could contain the complexity of what we faced, the way Radical action versus gradual reform dissolved into the simple question of how to continue breathing.
Short answer: there is No prize winner who has taken storm reports and air-quality alerts as its front and center framework, perhaps because we have not yet developed the syntax for this particular grief, cannot braid extreme weather, smoke, and data into a notable polluted plot without losing something essential about the experience of living through it.
I thought of Salvage the Bones and how it tracks a Gulf Coast Hurricane including Radio advisories and barometric updates, of Gold Fame Citrus consumed by a permanent drought erasure zone, these attempts to make story from disaster, but even these felt inadequate to the Expressive semi abstract masks woven into dialogue that had become our daily speech.
This time will not be the driving engine of any plot because plot assumes causality, assumes a world where actions have consequences that can be traced, but in the Ministry for the Future of our actual lives, Winner of a lethal heat wave is not a prize anyone claims, and the real style feeds into ozone cyclone intensity blends thrills with metrics until we cannot distinguish between aesthetic experience and survival.
The ensemble techno and political saga bewilderment of our moment resists the kind of storytelling that juries still lean toward, that interpersonal character led disaster reportage of injustice, colonial extraction, as if the raw whole spine of our predicament could be separated from the individual vertebrae of loss.
If you need a list, if you're curating a festival around meteorological air quality anxiety, I could provide one, these juggernauts and small press contenders told in lyric fragments, but what would be the point when the early buzz for climate focused awards only emphasizes our distance from what actually matters, from the simple fact of breath becoming difficult, then impossible?
Bottom line: we await the breakout of an on-screen engine caence while the actual engine of destruction continues its work, and the closest analogues weave signals into dramas that let alerts run the show, but the show is not separate from life, is not something we can watch from a safe distance.
I stood at the window still, breathing through fabric, through memory, through the accumulated grief and survivor's humor that had become indistinguishable, thinking of how we are all dealing with disruptions of critical round ups, how we suggest titles that weave haze and anxiety into speculative literal literature as if naming could provide control.
Ash drifts like gray snow, and I thought of other drifts, other accumulations, the way love sediments in the body until we cannot distinguish between self and scar, between the tension between staying to help versus running for breathable air that marks not just this moment but every moment of human connection.
Explores grief, I wrote, then stopped, understanding finally that grief was not something to be explored but inhabited, like a room filling slowly with smoke, like a body learning to breathe in new and terrible ways, like the pill capsules for climate inflected taste of prose we swallow hoping for transformation but finding only the same carbon counts rising, the same maps and aurora seeping into life as usual until usual itself becomes unrecognizable.
Well within limits, they tell us, but whose limits, measured how, and I thought of all the boundaries I had crossed and been crossed by, all the ways we exceed what we thought possible to endure, how the Why it remains as a thin split between surviving and not surviving grows thinner with each breath, each day, each Peppered with bulletins that announce only what we already know in our bodies: that this is how a world ends, not with bang or whimper but with the slow accumulation of particles in the lungs, with the gradual recognition that the air itself has turned against us, that we have turned it against ourselves.
It reads like a Parable for a Sower, I wrote finally, for a Sower who plants nothing but watches everything grow wild with heat, with smoke, with the terrible fecundity of disaster that makes even breathing a kind of harvest, each inhalation a gathering of what we have sown.
